Direction
by Muphrid
Summary: Four years after Rin left him in the rain, Hisao moves to Tokyo for graduate school, hoping to reestablish a friendship with the armless artist.
1. Doodles

**Doodles**

_Chapter One_

To this day, I still don't understand art.

Since I'm the only one in this traincar sketching in the margins of my notebook, I know that must sound strange. First term hasn't even begun, and I'm taking up space on all these clean sheets of paper, too. Talk about getting a head start on passing the time.

I get the feeling drawing isn't a popular diversion. I think most people feel they can't do it correctly, but there isn't really a right way or a wrong way. If you keep your goals modest, does it matter if you draw a person's head too large or the legs too small? Yeah, some know-it-all art major might say you don't know anything about good techniques, but for me, it's not about that. I don't pretend to be capable of the next _Mona Lisa_. I sketch things in my notebooks now and then—sometimes with pens way too thick to do anything precise—because it's a good distraction, because it helps me focus on something. Sometimes, I remember lectures better because I know what I was drawing while I wasn't really paying attention at the time. Weird, right?

But just because I can draw half-decent sketches and doodles doesn't mean I understand art. I don't, and I realized I don't have to. Everyone has their own interpretation of a work. Mine just happens to be abject bewilderment most of the time.

I don't draw to have my doodles understood, though. I'm not even really an artist. I studied physics in undergrad. In some ways, it's very different. There's a problem to be solved, and maybe you don't know how to solve it (or even what the problem is), but there's a clear goal in mind for every situation. As my optics professor said once, "If you're going to stand naked in front of a window in broad daylight, you'd better be sure more sunlight reflects than passes through, or else the police will quickly be at your door. Luckily, I can teach you the principles needed to figure out just that."

…he was actually one of the saner ones, too.

Believe it or not, though, art and science have a lot in common, too. In the end, nothing we find with science matters if we can't get the ideas across to others. With art, it's not necessarily idea. It could be a feeling you want to express, but the concept is the same. A mathematical equation or a painting on a canvass are both ways to communicate something that requires more than just words to express.

I knew someone once who found words all but impossible to work with.

And I'm going to see her.

I haven't spoken to her in years, not since a rainy day in the summer of my third year in high school. I've known for some time where she went after that—the art teacher, Nomiya, was all too proud of what Rin had accomplished, and he'd tell anyone who wanted to hear about her scholarship offer in Tokyo. She was his prized pupil, after all, and as sad as it was that she'd left him, he beamed with pride at even the mention of her name.

Rin wasn't like other people, though. She didn't care to stay in touch with people. She may have thought there was nothing to say. I've heard from other students from Yamaku now and then. Shizune has a business degree, but she spends a lot of time doing charity events and other good work like that. Mutou tells me Misha teaches sign language at Yamaku, and just by thinking about her, I can hear her laughter echoing through the halls. Rin's friend Emi is all over the Internet with photos of her running marathons all over the world. She's a personal trainer, and I think she must be happy drawing up dietary plans and exercise regimens for her clients.

I made a point to catch up with some friends of mine from home, too, once I graduated from Yamaku. Iwanako is married now, to a man I don't know, but I sent her my congratulations, which she accepted cordially. We've never discussed the letter she sent me after I left—or my short reply, which in hindsight I realize was altogether inadequate. To be honest, after all this time, I don't know what either of us would say.

Things are what they are, I guess. They're neither right nor wrong; there's only your willingness to change them, if you choose to.

That's part of why I'm on this train, surrounded by strangers who have no interest in my doodles. A couple pieces of luggage are all I have with me—barely more than what I brought to Yamaku. I might have to go back to my parents' house to pick up some more things later on. Yes, definitely. Home isn't where the heart is; it's where your stuff is. I've learned that well.

I say Rin is _part_ of the reason I'm coming to Tokyo because even if she weren't there, I'd have a good reason to go. Come Monday, I'll be a student in the physics master's program at University of Tokyo. It's daunting, being at the best school in the country. Already, I've heard horror stories from former students about professors humiliating them during presentations. Even one derisive snort while you're up there, standing before a panel of professors to explain and defend your research, could be soul-shattering. I hardly want to think about it. I've got nearly two years of work to do before I reach that point.

Still, I'm proud and honored just to be facing that challenge. I realized, after Rin left, that I'd thought she was an artist who made art for the sake of it. As difficult as she always was to understand, I couldn't have misjudged her more. I thought she was a person who could just put everything else aside because she had clear talent, because there was something she knew she could do. That's not Rin at all, though. All along, she was trying to find herself, and the process nearly destroyed her. I couldn't just hang around her and hope for a magic sense of purpose to fall into my lap, especially after she left. I buckled down and focused on what I wanted to do. Mutou helped with that a lot, and lo and behold, here I am.

If I look at my reflection in the train window, I think all I'd have to do to look like him is grow some stubble and put on a world-weary stare. Heh. What's scary is that I don't think I'd mind that.

Overall, I'm not going to get my hopes up. I'd be fine just seeing Rin once, saying hello, catching up, and going our separate ways again for a few years. That's what adults do, after all, right? They maintain friendships over decades, not needing to talk to someone every day or every other day or even less than that.

I realize I don't sound very convincing when I say that. Adulthood still puzzles me sometimes.

In the train, some of the passengers are starting to wake up. The lights flicker. A young girl in the row ahead me points and calls to her father. "Look, look, Daddy, the tower!"

The orange-and-white metal tower dominates the view. I've heard it's painted that way because of air safety, but that doesn't make a lot of sense. The Eiffel Tower doesn't have to be painted. There must be an explanation; it's something I'll have to look up, I guess. Still, I can't imagine the Tokyo Tower looking any other way. I quickly try to sketch it in my notebook, but it's difficult with other buildings zipping past. Maybe I can capture that with some kind of blur….

But it all zooms by in too much of a hurry. Before long, we're pulling into the train station, and I need to pack my things. Two bags? Check. Notebook? Check. Address card? Check. There's one more thing, though, and I pat my pocket to be sure it's there. As the train rolls to a stop, I pull it out just to check it's really what I think it is. It's a flyer—well, a flyer printed out on an ordinary sheet of paper, so the texture is smooth, not glossy.

"Tokyo University of the Arts — Opening Exhibition," reads the title, and the background is a cubist rendition of a man's face, in blue instead of skin tones. Apparently it's an annual tradition at the school to have the new students meet their peers through their work.

I can't think it's great advertising to put a bunch of students' names down as featured artists if no one knows who they are, but all I need to see is Rin's name to know where I'll be Monday night.

The train stops, and I close my notebook with the sketch of the Tokyo Tower unfinished. I'm okay with that. There's plenty of time to finish something once it's started.

Even if it takes me over four years to do it.

#

It seems like everywhere you go, the buses are the same. Some people can't stop checking their watches or their phones, wondering about the time or how late they might be. Others have music blaring in their ears, which would be fine except that everyone on the bus can hear them despite their headphones. It's like a tribe of monkeys all chattering away, or a group of angry percussionists banging on drums to no rhythm at all.

Or a tribe of monkeys banging on drums.

Is _tribe_ the right word for a group of monkeys, anyway? For some reason, I want to say _barrel_….

The bus ride is short, though, and a five minute walk from the stop brings me to a white apartment building with green, tinted windows. I double check the address on my card with the one by the door. Yep, this is the right place. This is home.

I feel lucky to be staying here. It's close to campus, and I notice right away how clean the carpets and the walls are. I actually feel a bit guilty. A friend of mine from undergrad heard I'd be going to Tokyo and offered to set me up with her little brother, who's just starting his first year there. Everything just fell into place without me really having to worry about it. On the way into town, I wondered if I should've been more diligent—if I should've looked at other places or come to town before the term started just to check things out—but so far, everything seems to be all right.

My apartment is on the eighth floor, and after getting the wheels on my luggage stuck at the elevator's threshold, I knock twice, just to be polite. I don't even have a key yet, so I hope someone's home.

Luckily, the lock clicks right away, and a kid with light brown hair—almost into his eyes—and a Yomiuri Giants baseball cap nods at me approvingly. "You're Nakai, right? Come on in."

He takes one of my bags in hand, struggling a bit. He's shorter than me, but not by much. I realize that he's not just wearing a baseball cap; he has a jersey on, too, though I don't recognize the name or number. What's most striking, though, are his two blue eyes—light in color, like the sky. I think it must run in the family.

Speaking of family…"I'm sorry, your name is Hayashi?" I ask. "I know Sumi got married, so I'm just trying to remember."

"Just _Mitsuru_ is fine," he says, fumbling for the keys to one of the bedrooms. "You're older than me, after all, right?"

I should hope so. "I'm Hisao, then."

"Cool. You know Sis from Kyoto, yeah?"

"Yeah, we studied physics together. To be honest, I was surprised she tracked me down. I hadn't seen her in a couple years. I know she was living on Okinawa for a while, but she's around here now? In Tokyo?"

He nods. "we came out here about a week ago. We couldn't get an apartment big enough for the three of us, though, so she and Ryou have their own place."

Too bad they couldn't stay together. I'll have to ask where she is and visit, but right now, I'd rather get settled in. Mitsuru helps me unpack my bags, and I quickly start laying out my desk with notebooks, pens, pencils, the works. My endtable is for meds, and while the array of pills I have to take has shrunk in the last few years, it's still an intimidating regimen. The way Mitsuru stares at the line of bottles tells me that question is coming up sooner rather than later.

"I have a heart condition," I explain.

"A heart condition? But you're only what, twenty-two?"

"That's why it's a big deal," I say. I try to sound nonchalant about it, but it's clear he's still surprised. Still, he has the tact not to say anything else about it, which is a relief, but in the silence, I try to steer the conversation elsewhere. "So, you like baseball?"

"Yeah, you?"

I wince. "Can't say I've followed it. I guess I was more into soccer when I was younger, but even then, I only played occasionally."

"Soccer's cool; I don't have a problem with it, but baseball is an ancient and storied game, man, with wisdom for the ages. There's just nothing else like it."

I somehow doubt the Egyptians were playing baseball while on breaks from pyramid building. Anything more recent than that doesn't strike me as ancient, but I let it pass. "What exactly is this wisdom for the ages that baseball is supposed to teach us about?"

The way Mitsuru's eyes light up, I know I've gotten into more than I asked for. "Everything, man, everything. I mean, let's take you as an example. You're going to Toudai—the best university in country—for your master's degree, right?"

"Yeah…"

"Are you nervous about it?"

"A little. I mean, I know there's a lot of coursework and research and probably the publishing of a few papers…."

He starts grinning, and I can only imagine I'm already making a worried face. Mitsuru doesn't mind, though. He gets right to the point.

"So it's like undergrad was your minor leagues, and now you're ready to break into the majors. You're like, hm—maybe Matt Anderson? Yeah, Matt Anderson in the '97 draft. That guy could break 160 on the radar gun easy!"

Let's stop right here. I know almost nothing about baseball, let alone American baseball, let alone what radar guns have to do with anything. Ask me about the Doppler effect, sure, but this is all beyond me.

"Is that a good number—160, I mean?" I ask. "I guess for a car that would be pretty fast."

"It is. He tore through the minors and made it to the big leagues, striking out 44 men in 44 innings."

That sounds impressive, but don't they usually face at least three batters in an inning? What happened to the other two?

I get the feeling that's all irrelevant to the point. "So, this Anderson guy had a good career in the major leagues after doing well in the—the…"

"The minors?"

"Yeah, the minors. So you're saying that because I did well in undergrad, I'll do well in grad school, too. That's what you're saying, right? Because this Anderson guy did so well in the majors after proving himself in the lower levels of baseball?"

"Well, yeah, until he tore a muscle in his arm."

"He what?"

Mitsuru shrugs. "Anderson tore a muscle in his armpit after four years and never succeeded in professional baseball after that again. Too bad. He was the number one pick, too."

Whatever encouragement this story was supposed to give me is seeping away like the air from a punctured tire. And I'm not convinced baseball was really needed to tell me I could fail miserably at my degree, either.

Mercifully, there's a knock on the door, and Mitsuru goes to answer before he can crush my spirit with any other depressing anecdotes. I thought sports were supposed to be uplifting.

"Need something?" asks Mitsuru, which strikes me as a bit casual to say to a guest.

"Nah, just seeing if your roommate's arrived." The voice sounds slightly hoarse, but it's definitely a girl's voice. "Is he in?"

"Yeah."

"Did you tell him a silly baseball story yet?"

"No! …maybe."

I peer out from my bedroom. Mitsuru and the girl are still talking at the doorway; he hasn't even let her inside. She's shorter than he is, with dark hair tied up in a ponytail. Having her hair up accentuates her forehead, but only a little. Like Mitsuru's, her eyes are a distinct shade of blue, but she wears a pair of glasses with black rims and sharp corners. She's thin and, well, rather flat. Not that this is the first thing I look for in a woman. Really.

"Hey, stranger," she says to me, waving. "Liking your new digs?"

That's Sumi for you—very casual. "Haven't really had a chance to settle in," I answer. "What brings you here? Checking on your little brother?"

"On you, of course. And on Mitchan, a little."

Mitsuru scowls at the nickname. I'm glad she doesn't call me _Hicchan_.

"And also to steal a little soy sauce," Sumi goes on, rummaging through the kitchen cupboards for a bottle.

"You need to go shopping," says Mitsuru.

"Shut up!" She says this with a sing-songy lilt; she's not being serious. "Anyway, if I keep running out of condiments, I may pop back in, so keep your door unlocked, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah." Mitsuru rolls his eyes.

Sumi puts her slippers back on as she's headed out the door. "Good to see you, Hisao. You don't have any plans for lunch, right?"

"Ah, no?" I say.

"Awesome. Get back to settling in then; I won't be too long."

She ducks out, and I'm left a bit crosseyed. I turn to Mitsuru, who's closing the cupboards Sumi left open. "Something wrong?" he asks.

"Yeah. Where is she going with that bottle of soy sauce?"

"Her place."

"Which is where?"

"Across the hall?"

I feel like I opened a jigsaw puzzle and only realized that, after staring at it for several hours, I'd yet to actually scramble the pieces. "She lives across the hall?"

"Yeah. Didn't you know? All week, she's been so excited about having a friend from her old school to go to classes with and study and stuff."

Now I think my eyes are about to roll back into my head. Maybe I'm just not one for surprises. At any rate, it's enough for me to go through the door and knock at the apartment across the hall. I hear a pot clanking on a stove, and Sumi answers right away with a dishrag between her hands.

"Forget something, Hisao? I don't have a lot of extra supplies, but if you left something at home, I can take a look around."

That's hardly what this is about. I've been brought here under false pretenses! If Sumi had told me she lived just next door, I would've…I would've…well, I would've _felt_ different about things! Because then they would be different. Different from now.

Thankfully, Mitsuru has the presence of mind to break the silence that's gripped Sumi and me. "Sis, you didn't tell him you were going to school together," he explains.

"What?" She puts her hands on her hips, indignant. "Yes, I did! I totally fucking did." A look of worry comes over her face, though, and she glances at me. "Didn't I?"

I shake my head feebly.

"Oh. Well, surprise?"

Another voice calls from inside the apartment. "Sumi, I think you're about to burn something."

Panicking, Sumi races from the door. She's cute when she's flustered; she does this motion with her hands like you'd expect a bad actor to do in a stage play when he's supposed to be horrified, except for her it's genuine. I peer in, and I see a man in a muscle shirt sitting in front of the television in the corner of the main room. He's hammering away at the buttons of a video game controller while colorful explosions and harsh sounds come from the set.

"You're Nakai, right?" he says, glancing at me from the corner of his eye. "I'm Ryou, Sumi's husband."

Yes, it's hard to forget. Sumi got married before she left for Okinawa. Even while she's cooking, she wears the ring proudly on her finger. I'd never met her husband, but I'd seen some photos. They're high school sweethearts or something like that. I think glumly I could've had a high school sweetheart, too, but that's not really true. Maybe it would've been possible with Iwanako. As for Rin, I dare say she wasn't the type for such a neat and convenient label. Rin was always more complicated, more unique.

Sumi's husband Ryou is a tall, muscular man. I can tell even while he's sitting; he's that impressive. With Ryou playing games and Sumi fretting over the stove, the door is left open, and I'm a little lost over what to do. Mitsuru solves the dilemma, though. He wanders in and motions for me to follow. He even picks up another game controller and sits down with Ryou.

"Maybe we can do a deathmatch," he suggests to Ryou gently. "Three-way free-for-all?"

Ryou blinks at this, puzzled, but as I take a seat beside him he seems to understand. "Oh, yeah. Why not? Let me get the spare controllers. Guess it's a good thing we got four after all, right, Sumi?"

"If we hadn't, nothing would've stopped us from getting a fourth while Hisao was coming into town," Sumi counters. I get the feeling there's more to this argument than meets the eye.

Ryou right away makes himself known as a man of few words. While we shoot rockets and throw grenades at each other, Mitsuru raucously cheers and hollers whenever he scores a kill. Ryou, on the other hand, fights with a level of intensity that seems unnatural, even counterproductive for enjoyment.

As for me, I'm not too hot on video games in the first place; I still prefer to read and be engaged in something I can remember instead of dozens of matches that are forgotten as soon as we move on to the next. Still, it's fun being around other people, and I don't know why I was so uneasy that Sumi and Ryou would be close by. I've been in Tokyo for just a few hours, and the four of us are already hanging out like we've known each other all our lives. It's a good feeling.

Almost as good as running toward your attacker after he sticks you with a plasma grenade and getting him killed in the same explosion that kills you.

"You've got to be kidding!" cries Mitsuru, banging a hand on his controller. "You learn fast, Hisao."

"Not surprised," says Sumi. "His test marks always fucked with grading scales in our classes."

I'm forced to snort a little; Sumi's casual swearing takes some getting used to again, and she's already dropped two bombs in the span of a couple hours. She doesn't seem to think anything of it, though.

After about an hour and a half of gaming, Sumi orders us to put the controllers away and eat. Sumi is, I'm learning, an excellent chef, and very self-sufficient, too. Mitsuru and I only left the game a handful of times to help watch the food while she hunted down more tableware or other missing items.

When it's time to eat, it's a little after one in the afternoon—not an unreasonable time to eat at all. While I'm trying to decide what to taste first—the grilled salmon smells delicious, but I've always had a soft spot for shrimp—Sumi fills me in on the two years of her life I've missed.

"Ryou enlisted in the Self-Defense Force shortly after we married," she explains. "His duty took him to Okinawa, so we packed up and moved there until he completed his assignment. I got into a good program over there; there's actually a ton of high-energy physics on the island. It was almost all that they did."

"Really?" I ask. "Is that what you're going to do here?"

She shakes her head vehemently. "Hell no. If I have to deal with fucking spectroscopic notation again, I will die. Seriously. There was no variety down there. They don't have any particle accelerators or anything; it's all just analyzing data from other labs and schools. That's just not my thing. But I still love doing physics. I'm sure I'll find something to do."

She says it so casually. I have to wonder how she had the wherewithal to go through a program she clearly didn't like. I guess she must've had an eye to the future, knowing that she wouldn't be there forever.

"Otherwise," she goes on, "there were a lot of Americans, as you'd expect. It's pretty educational, and you really get a broader sense of things from talking to them. One of my professors was an American, and he pointed this out to me: we tend to think of Japan as a small country, right?"

Everyone around the table nods.

"But you'd say Germany is a big country, right? Well, Japan is actually bigger than Germany. I'm not shitting you with this; it's not just all the tiny little islands that no one's living on, either. And if you say, what, that Japan is just more densely populated than a lot of countries? It's really not. Belgium, India, the Netherlands—they're all at least as crowded as we are. It's just our mindset, you know? It's like cultural identity. It's really awesome to realize just how much of that is ingrained in what we think. That, and…" She stifles a laugh. "And Ryou asked one of the American soldiers if they had McDonald's in the States!"

"It's not obvious," Ryou insists.

"It's meant to sound Scottish or something. Like that movie Sean Connery was in—"

"Sean Connery's been in a lot of movies," says Mitsuru.

"And he _is_ Scottish," I add.

"Not the point! It's that movie where there can only be one, and Sean Connery plays a Spanish guy, even though he's Scottish, and a French guy plays a Scotsman. His name was Connor MacLeod."

That phrase is familiar—"there can only be one"—but it elicits only a vague feeling that I've blotted something from my own memories. And that someone owes me a few hundred yen, plus interest.

"How do you write that in English?" asks Mitsuru, and when Sumi writes it, he scoffs. "There's an extra _a_. It's not the same."

"It totally is," says Sumi.

"Is not!"

At this point, I pull back from the argument. With Sumi and Mitsuru's good-natured banter in the background, it's just nice to be here. In just the span of a few hours, this already feels something like home.

#

I go back across the hall after lunch is over. Mitsuru and Ryou are still going at it with the video games, but half of my stuff is still packed up, and I want to get that taken care of before tomorrow. It doesn't take long, though. Having gone from home to Yamaku, then to undergrad in Kyoto, and now here, I realize the benefit of traveling light. Each new home is a chance for a fresh start.

When all my clothes and books are squared away, all I have on my desk is the flyer to the exhibition. The last thing I want to do is run late tomorrow, and walking around sounds like a good way to keep from thinking about things too much.

Rin's school actually isn't very far from Toudai—in theory, just a fifteen-minute walk northeast, but it's Sunday afternoon in Tokyo. The streets are packed, and I find myself taking cautious strides at each intersection. Luckily, the route is mostly a straight shot along a single street, so it's not too hard to follow. I'm glad for that. I think even just the better part of a year at Yamaku changed me a bit. I'm no longer fond of the hustle and bustle of the city. There are good parts to it—the ease of access, the sense of being at the heart of humanity—but ultimately, I think I'd like to go back to some place outside of the big city to settle down at. Kyoto was good about that, too, with the mountainous scenery ever-present on the horizon.

That's not to say Tokyo's all that bad. It's not, and I like that as I get closer to Rin's school, more and more of the cityscape is intermingled with trees. Come to think of it, I've seen a few signs for a park around here, but I admit I haven't the slightest clue where it could be.

When I reach the corner across from the school grounds, I rest for a bit by a directory and close my eyes. The walk hasn't been too stressful, but it never hurts to check myself and listen. For now, the time bomb in my chest is behaving, and I'm not too winded or worn out, but I'm not afraid to admit that the condition of my heart weighs on me from time to time.

Or that, knowing I may die sooner rather than later has played a part in me wanting to resolve the mistakes I've made. I think if I'd been stronger and more resolute about it, I would've made a point to come here even sooner, instead of waiting for a time where avoiding her would've proved painful. But that's all in the past. I can't fix that. I'm here now, and I've had a lot of time to think about what I did and how I acted.

All along, I thought Rin was soaring high above the plane of ordinary men, dealing with concepts and thoughts totally alien to the rest of us mere mortals. The passage of time hasn't really changed that view. She could make connections between things that I never understood, and that made a lot of her behavior incomprehensible to me. My mistake was in letting that bother me, in believing she wanted to sit on that plane of inspiration in isolation, but that's not true at all. Rin was a person just like anyone else, and as much as her unique thought processes gave her insight, they also distanced her from people.

And that's why Rin painted—to try to break down that barrier, to open up a line of communication with people where words so often failed her.

To think I never even looked at her paintings that way. I always thought I should get an impression of something from her works, but insight into her? Where could I even begin?

So in my despair and frustration, I told her the truth as I saw it—that people can't really expect to understand each other. And to this day, I still think that's true. For someone whose mind works so differently from the rest of—for someone like Rin—real understanding may be all but impossible.

But in the years since we parted in the rain, I've come to add a corollary to that postulate of life: as difficult as it may be to find understanding, even minuscule, incomplete comprehension of another soul is worth pursuing, and it is its own reward. It's like Plato's theory of forms. If all we can truly understand about another person is the influence she exerts on the world around her, we can still infer something about who she is, however vague and general those observations might be.

It seems like a small comfort. It may be something I thought of just to argue with Rin's stubbornness—no, her dejectedness—at the time, but for now, I'm sticking to it. For that, my heart is steady, and I can press on.

When the signals change, I cross and head toward a building with a two-tone exterior—reddish near the ground level and metallic gray on the upper floor. I want to say this is the state of modern art, but I think it has to do more with making a hasty addition to an older structure. The flyers plastered around the exterior tell me I'm in the right place—in fact, they tell me this every three or four steps.

I circle around to the front door of the building, finding a couple more flyers taped to the glass of the doors, as well as a sign with a red arrow saying, "Exhibition hall." Mission accomplished, I guess. If I get lost on the inside of the building, I'm pretty sure I deserve to miss Rin.

"Excuse me!"

A woman's voice calls to me. She's a bit short, mostly hidden behind a large, rectangular canvass and frame that she's carrying.

"Young man, could you open that door, please? I promise you'll have an old woman's gratitude for the next ten minutes. After that, I can't promise I'll remember you, but it's the thought that counts, right?"

I obligingly hold the door open, and as the old woman passes, I see more of her. Her hair is all gray, but it's still long and flowing. Despite her claimed age, the woman's eyes are wide, alert, and sharp as she guides the canvass through the door. She wears a pair of overalls, which are stained with a rainbow of paint splotches.

"Thank you, young man, but we're holding an exhibition here tomorrow," she says, clearing the doorway. "The building is closed to the public, so I must ask you to—"

Her eyes flicker to me, and she abruptly cuts herself off. She turns a shade paler than when she walked in, I think. I can't help but wonder if there's something on my face.

"I'm sorry, I was just looking around," I say, trying to break the sudden silence. "I was planning on visiting tomorrow. I'm new in town, so I wanted to find my way."

"New in town?" she echoes, letting the painting lean against the doorframe, but her eyes never leave mine. "Is that right?"

"It is. I'm not a student here; I go to Toudai." I shift my weight, feeling uncomfortable. Something about this old woman's gaze is boring through me. She studies me head to toe, nodding, like I'm a subject she's about to paint.

"I see. New in town. Graduate school?"

How could she possibly—

"It's a small talent I have, to tell people's ages at a glance. It's not difficult. It just takes practice. Go ahead, young man. Guess how old I am. I promise not to get mad."

I stare at her, slack-jawed. A promise not to get angry seems like little more than a trap!

"Oh-ho-ho, I see you're a careful one! Well, such wisdom is a fair talent of its own these days. Please, young man, come inside. If you're interested in art, it would be a shame to turn you away."

I frown. "Is that really all right?"

"Of course it is. Why do you think I'm carrying this painting? Because I happen to run this exhibition. Professor Haruka Adachi, at your service." She does a slight bow—very slight, since it's all she can manage without dragging the painting on the floor. "Who might you be?"

"Ah, my name is Nakai. Hisao Nakai."

She nods knowingly. "Of course it is."

"Pardon?"

"Ah, nothing, nothing. I was just thinking you look like a Hisao."

I can't say I've ever had that said to me before….

As strange as she is, I follow Professor Adachi without question up the stairs to the exhibition hall. The lights are bright and hot, and I can't help but think the black walls intensify the effect. A handful of students are helping hang paintings. I halfway hope Rin might be there, but I realize that hanging paintings would be a challenge for her.

"So you're interested in art, Hi—er, pardon me, Nakai?" asks Professor Adachi.

"Ah, I, uh, don't know if I could say that. I doodle from time to time. I can't say I'm serious about it."

"Who can?" she remarks. "Art is a form of expression. The people you'll meet here—myself included—are serious about expression. Sure there's something therapeutic, even enjoyable, about the mechanical process of putting pigment to canvass, of molding clay with one's hands, but that's more a matter of the choice of medium, of the process. When you sketch or doodle or whatever you choose to call it, do you have an idea or a feeling in mind?"

I wince. "Not really?"

To my relief, Professor Adachi only smiles. "Such honesty. You might be surprised how refreshing that is to me. For a school of people so obsessed with expressing themselves, honesty can be hard to come by around here, and the person an artist is likely to lie to the most is herself. Keep that in mind when you come by tomorrow, Nakai. The girls here can promise you much, but in the end, they are all artists at heart."

I must be missing something. "Professor?"

"Well, if you're not really interested in art and you're new in town, I can only take that to mean you're looking to meet girls," she says matter-of-factly. "You don't need to feel ashamed about it. I met my late husband at an exhibition like this."

"No, it's not—" I shut up. There's no fighting the color in my cheeks. Professor Adachi isn't quite right, but she's uncomfortably close to the mark.

"Ah, I see. There's already a special girl for you, hm? Well, that's good. Try to keep up, then, Nakai. I'm going to give you a tour of this exhibition. That way, when you come by and meet her tomorrow, you'll be in a position to impress her with all that you know."

I kind of doubt a fifteen-minute primer on the pieces of the exhibition will really help me impress Rin. To be honest, I haven't the slightest idea what would impress her, or if I even should try to. I'm just here to be me, not to win her back or do anything else.

But Professor Adachi seems oblivious to my hesitation. She points out a nearby landscape. "Have you been to the park? It's just behind the school. It's quite lively. Ninomiya, one of my colleague's students, likes to use a thick brush. She's quite capable of exacting precision, but the thicker strokes give it a softer feel that I quite like. What do you think of it?"

It's true, the tree trunks and walkways in the piece are hardly straight or narrow. Still, the combination of strokes gives the right impression. The work is like something formed in the mind's eye. It makes sense as a whole, even when the individual details are puzzling.

"I think it's soothing?" I offer.

"No need to make it a question. What you feel is what you feel. Let's keep moving, shall we?"

Obediently I follow, not entirely sure why I should. Professor Adachi leads me around like the Pied Piper, and I only know to stop when she circles around a pedestal, guiding my eye with her hands. The piece is a white, unpainted sculpture. It's rigid and geometric—a series of pyramids built on top of each other. I hardly understand how it holds together.

"Another of my colleagues is advisor to this boy. His name is Kimura. Geometry captures people's attention, for it's something most of us think we understand intuitively. There are things that are possible and things that are not, yet art allows us to create impossible-seeming constructs and images. Tell me, Nakai, what do you feel when you look at this sculpture?"

"It makes me think there's something I don't know about that must keep it standing," I answer. "I want to find out what that is."

"And that, in turn, tells me you have an inquisitive mind. I'm curious—what do you study?"

"I'm a physicist."

"Ah, science. Is that what brings you here? The compulsion to solve a puzzle, no matter how difficult it may prove? That drive isn't unlike an artist's drive, you know. It's natural to want to understand something that goes against our everyday human experiences, but I think there's much to be said for making the most of something seemingly ordinary. Come. I want you to look at something from one of my students."

She leads me to a corner of the exhibition hall, where there's a painting of a bowl of fruit. I don't know much about art, but this seems like a rite of passage. Any artist needs to be able to paint (or sketch) a bowl of fruit. What strikes me about this painting is how incredibly lifelike it is. It's almost photographic in detail. In the bowl, there's an apple, which reflects the light from the window with a noticeable sheen. There are a pear, a banana, a pineapple, and more, but a few inches from the bowl rests another fruit on the bare surface of the table. It's white and molding, to the point it's unrecognizable.

"What is that?" I ask Adachi, trying to point it out discreetly.

"I asked that same question myself of the artist. She tells me it's an orange. Examined in isolation, the color does show hints of it, but it's hard to tell given the lighting implied in the piece. It is, indeed, decayed to the point that only the barest bits of it can be recognized as belonging to an orange at all. Yet still, the fruit retains its shape. To someone who doesn't see color, would it look like an orange, just given the context? I can't say. Perhaps she should've painted it in black and white for effect, but far be it for me to question the intentions of my students, let alone one as gifted as Tezuka."

I can hardly keep from blurting out my surprise. "Rin did this?"

Adachi raises an eyebrow. "Yes. She's quite skilled. Rin came to me as an unpolished and mercurial creature, very set in her ways, but in the past few years, she's driven herself toward mastering a wide array of styles and techniques. I dare say she is the most well-rounded of any student in the school, despite her, ah, _unusual_ demeanor."

That's an understatement, as would be me saying that Rin's work here is a surprise. A whole corner of the exhibition hall is dedicated to Rin, and each painting seems to represent a different artistic style. There's a beach or shore of some kind, rendered strictly in circular dollops of paint. The cubist face on the front of the brochure is here—it's Rin's, too. They even have a sketch of the street outside the school, rendered primitively like a five-year-old drew it in crayon.

On some level, I'm relieved. Rin's abstract stuff was always so obtuse to me. That she can paint and express herself in all these different ways gives me hope we can find a connection after all.

At the same time, it also tells me that Rin has changed quite a bit since I last saw her. She must've. How else could she bring herself to embrace this wide array of styles?

She's grown a lot, perhaps in ways I can't hope to understand, and I wonder if, come tomorrow, I will recognize her at all.

#

It's not like I haven't changed since Rin left, either. I have. When I came to Yamaku, I didn't really know what I would do with my life—or even if I'd have that long to worry about it. But the future waits for no man. Rin went to pursue hers; I needed to do the same. Mutou was a big help. He talked with me about science programs around the country and helped me realize what my talents could do. If not for his advice, I wouldn't be here. So really, I shouldn't worry over how Rin may have changed. I'm sure we both have, and that's okay.

It's morning now. Professor Adachi's tour gave me a lot to think about, but it's a new day, and I have my own life to worry over. I get up at eight, down my pills, and sneak in a quick shower. Mitsuru is waiting for me as soon as I get out, looking bleary-eyed and zombie-like, but he heads in without a word. It's at this point I realize, for all my preparations, I've neglected to get any groceries for breakfast. I'm forced to go knock on Sumi's door to beg for food. I really need to make that up to her.

It takes a few moments, but she comes to answer. "Hey. You're not ready to go already, are you?"

I wasn't intending to, and she doesn't look ready either. Her glasses are askew, and her hair is all wet. She's dressed already—thank goodness—but I can smell a hint of lavender on her. She turns somewhat away from me as she tries to tie up her ponytail, and I can see the outline of a bird with its wings spread covering half of her upper back. This is no small tattoo. I had no idea she was into that sort of thing.

"Hisao? Hello?"

I turn my attention up, to her eyes, which are still furrowed in concentration as she ties up her ponytail. "No, I just, uh, realized I don't have anything to eat," I say sheepishly. It suddenly seems like begging for food isn't the only thing I have to be sheepish about.

"Food?" Her eyes flash in realization. "Shit. That's important. Uh…"

In her trademark controlled panic style, Sumi goes about the kitchen and the refrigerator, looking for food. We don't have a lot of time, and I think that limits her options. Hastily, she throws a couple pieces of bread in the toaster and looks at me with an apologetic simper.

"I'm so sorry; it slipped my mind. I went over my stuff three times, making sure I had the texts, my notebooks, pens, pencils, and so on, but I didn't think about food."

"I'm surprised Ryou didn't remind you," I say.

She makes a face at that. "Ah, he's not up yet. He'll probably take his time or go get something from the convenience store. Let me see, what else can I do…?"

"Don't worry about it. I already owe you too much for finding this place for me and treating me to lunch yesterday. I'm no expert cook, but I can handle some basic breakfast stuff. It wouldn't be a problem to do that regularly for the four of us."

She makes a wry smile at that. "Only if we all split the cost of food. Don't say anything different, either. You're too nice of a person, Hisao, and people will take advantage of you otherwise."

"People like you?" I joke.

"Maybe," she says coyly.

The toast pops up, finished, and she snatches the two pieces quickly, eyeing her watch. We eat as we walk, not talking very much except to navigate the campus and make our way to class. We make it to class with five minutes to spare, and most of our fellow students have already taken their seats. Sumi finds a desk in the second row, and I sit behind her. Like my major classes at Kyoto, girls are a rarity here. I count three in total, including Sumi. Well, that's all right. I didn't choose this field because of the dating opportunities.

Our first class is classical mechanics—the motions of objects under the influence of forces like gravity, but not including Einstein's relativity. In some ways, it's a basic topic, even if the approaches are a lot more sophisticated than what you'd see in undergrad. At the same time, it's essential because the techniques used are the foundation for other topics.

It is the first day, so the professor elects for a broad overview of what we'll cover and how it all connects together. He strikes me as a bit dull. He makes a joke about a being able to calculate how fast a frog would spin if it were struck by a car while crossing a road. I think it would be pretty funny, if in a morbid sort of way, but delivered in a serious context and with a serious delivery, all the professor is met with is stunned silence.

I feel a bit bad for him, but only briefly, because by the end of class, we already have assignments. We don't even know anything yet!

Our next class is an hour away, so many of us retreat to our offices. The department actually gives us two offices for the new master's students, where we're supposed to hang out and collaborate. Sumi's office is in the center of the building; mine is on the northern wall. I store my things in my desk and lock it. Both desks beside me are left with stuff hanging around but the owners nowhere to be found, so I start to crack open a book. It's one I've read before, and I'm almost at the end anyway—it still gets me every time the kid realizes the wargames he's been playing are real. I don't get too much further, for there's a sudden squeaking sound beside me. It's Sumi, spinning uncontrolled in a chair that doesn't belong to her.

"Really? Your first instinct when in a new situation is to open up a book?"

"There a problem with books?" I ask.

"No problem, but there's a time and a place. You should come to the other office. Everybody's doing it, which means you should be, too."

I glance down and back along the row of desks. Somehow, I managed to miss the memo about where the party would be, I guess. I need to figure out why that happens, but maybe later. I put my book away and follow Sumi back to her office, finding the desk next to hers unattended. Right away, I can feel the changed atmosphere. The lights are brighter, and there's chatter on both side of the divider that cuts the room in two.

"See?" says Sumi. "It's lively over here."

Another student rolls up to his in his rolling chair. He's a bit overweight, with stubble around his chin and up his cheeks, but his eyes are keen and his tone jovial. "Only reason we're lively is because the full magnitude of the doom coming to us hasn't really sunk in yet. Nice to meet you guys; my name's Takeda. Or you can call me Jirou, if you want."

I ask, "Why do you think we're doomed?"

"It's just the nature of the thing," says Jirou. "They're going to work us to the bone and see which of us can take it. That, and physics professors can be pretty scattered. I heard the quantum guy this year accidentally 'forgot' to give his students two of their assignments until right before final exams. Two weeks, twenty problems, and no one had any idea how to do half of them."

Another student turns around from his desk. He wears a sweater and has thin, oval glasses and short brown hair. He's definitely foreign, but from where I can't say. "It can't be that bad, right?" he says, with hardly a trace of an accent. "I mean, if we're all in that much of a pinch, they can't fail the whole class."

"Well, they won't fail you because you're on a scholarship here from France," says Jirou. "Everyone else here is fair game."

"Fair point, fair point," says the Frenchman. "I just don't see the point in stressing out about it. The term just started. I'm sure it'll all work out." He looked my directions and extends a hand. "I'm Michel Dubois. I'm over here from Nantes."

"Hisao Nakai," I say, touching my own chest. "And this is Sumi…ah…"

"Aoki," she finishes, giving me a slight jab in the ribs. "Really, Hisao? You forgot my name? I'm giving you so much shit for this, I swear."

I sigh, and Jirou and Michel have a good chuckle at my expense. The four of us spend most of the our just chatting to pass the time. It seems that here, like in Kyoto, most physicists are procrastinators, and the thought of starting our assignments so early—before we've hardly had any lectures, even—is anathema. Sumi and I tell the others a little bit about ourselves, and they share some of their background as well.

"I actually spend several years in IT," Jirou explains. "I'm twenty-nine. Coming back to science is something I never thought I'd have the chance to do, but I just got so tired of dealing with customers who didn't have the faintest idea what was going on, I just had to do it. So, if I seem a bit panicky to you guys, it's because if I get bounced out of here I don't know if I'll get another chance, you know?"

Michel, on the other hand, is the total opposite of Jirou. He's calm and relaxed, and I can't help but think every time he speaks that his Japanese is very good—not just for a foreigner, either.

"I always wanted to see the world, you know?" Michel explains. "And I've had a strong interest in Japanese culture and history for some time. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to get out here and see the country. I feel like it's a different mindset over here, a different work ethic than in the West."

"You mean aside from when we're all dicking around instead of working on our first assignment?" says Jirou.

Michel shrugs. "That I understand. I don't particularly want to get cracking on that either. What are we supposed to do, pretend we know Lagrangian mechanics on our first day?"

Before long, though, it's time to head back for class, and as Jirou hinted at, fate brings us to meet our new quantum mechanics professor. He's Russian, and well, he's _very_ Russian. It's hard for him to get fifteen seconds into a thought about wavefunctions and superposition of states before he steps back from the chalkboard and stares at it ominously, like even his own handwriting and notes don't make sense.

All this downtime gives me a chance to doodle, and I think the most accurate way to capture the start and stop nature of this quantum class is to draw a wave packet traveling through space, only to abruptly stop while a mini, bespectacled Russian quantum professor holds up his hand to think about what the wave should do next.

It's probably not the next candidate for best four-panel comic in Japan. That much I'll admit.

To my surprise, Sumi passes the time in a similar way. She goes through a variety of different-colored pens, boxing various sections of her notes and covering the pages in a bewildering array of arrows and lines. She looks immensely satisfied when she finishes one such correction, even pumping her fist in excitement as she puts a pen down. It's pretty cute.

Beyond that, my eyes wander a little bit while our quantum professor tries to get his addled mind together, and I'm ashamed to say they happen to glance down, where Sumi's crossed legs extend into the aisle. Sumi doesn't seem fond of makeup or fancy dress. It's a fairly warm day, and Sumi's choice of attire is, I'm sure, comfortable for her. Her bare legs are shapely and toned. I think I remember her saying she used to run cross-country at one time. Maybe I should hook her up with Emi for them to do some distance running together.

Still, I try to force my gaze up to the chalkboard. Sumi's a married woman, after all. I suppose admiring is harmless, but if she catches me staring, that would get awkward fast.

Quantum class ends, I think the whole last five minutes were spent in utter silence while our professor stared at the board, lost in thought. He does, however, have the gall to announce our first assignment, which he says will come by e-mail later in the day. The due date, he says, is "negotiable."

This is a very strange professor.

I move to pack up my things, and I glance one more time down Sumi's chair.

"Hisao."

Oh damn. I'm caught. I'm caught, and I turn as red as a beet. I hesitate to meet Sumi's gaze, but her expression is as casual as ever.

"Have any plans for lunch?" she asks.

I really need to stop worrying about these things. I shake my head feebly, worrying that my voice will betray me if I dare speak up.

"Awesome. Let's go grab a bite then, yeah?"

Sumi leads the way around campus like she already knows the place. There are actually a few places to eat around school grounds, but they're all packed, and the lines are intolerable. We settle for instant ramen from a nearby convenience store, and we head back toward our offices to get water and use the department-provided microwaves. Still, it's too nice a day to stay inside, and once our food is ready, Sumi and I take our meals to a flat wooden bench outside the building.

"I really meant to make some lunches, too," Sumi notes, a bit dejected. "There's just so much going on right now. You know what? Mitchan should get off his ass and help out with some of this stuff. He can learn to make breakfast."

"It's really all right," I tell her. "You guys have done more than enough. I'm fine with getting lunch around here at the spur of the moment. Three meals a day is a lot for us to handle. We're students. We're busy people, and full home-cooked meals aren't necessarily cheap."

"That's true. Ryou was pretty pissed about how much I spent putting together lunch yesterday, but it's literally the first time I've seen my brother in six months, and I figured you'd enjoy a good meal, too. If I don't keep you well fed, you're no good to me."

I raise an eyebrow. "No good for what?"

"For mooching homework answers off of. What else?"

I laugh nervously. Did she really arrange for me to stay with her brother and all of this so she could…?

Sumi snickers, and when my eyes widen, she starts laughing uncontrollably. Her whole face goes red as she can hardly keep her amusement in. "Really, Hisao? You thought—ahaha! I'm not that bad; I promise. Honest to goodness. I mean, I might need some help now and then, and I'm not afraid to admit the speed that we're getting assignments is starting to scare me, but it's just better to learn the material together, you know? I've always felt that way."

"I think so, too," I manage to say.

Sumi smiles at that, and then she slurps up some noodles in a profoundly unladylike fashion. I don't mind, though. Sumi's pretty cool, and I feel like I've gotten to know her better over the last two days then I did in two years at Kyoto. It may be I was too hung up over Rin to really focus on meeting other people, even as friends, until later on. It still makes me wonder why Sumi's gone so far out of her way to help me out, but whatever the reason, I'm thankful for it.

As we finish up lunch, something vibrates in Sumi's purse. She fishes through it to find her phone. "Ah, Ryou," she mutters with a sigh. "Sorry. This'll just take a sec." She starts texting him back, and I politely avert my gaze. Something in her purse catches my eye, though. She actually carries quite a large bag with her, and it's enough to conceal a paperback: _Kokoro_, by Souseki Natsume.

"Are you reading this?" I ask her, nudging the book out to read the title.

"Hm? Ah, yeah. It was a gift from Ryou I've been chipping away at." She slides the book back in her purse and zips it up with a dose of finality.

"Is it any good?"

She shrugs. "It's just about stuff right around the time of the death of Emperor Meiji. It's very much about the period. That's all I can tell you. I'm not very far in it, though."

"Well, if that's the case," I say, "I might pick up a copy and read it, too. I've been into books for a while. It'll be nice to read something with a friend."

She doesn't look up to meet my gaze, instead staring down at her food. "Sure," she says, her voice distant and flat. "If you want."

We don't say anything else for the rest of lunch.

#

Afternoon is quite a bit less taxing than the morning, as we have no more classes for the rest of the day. Our schedules alternate with two classes three days a week and the other two classes for longer periods the other two days. The only activity this afternoon is a talk from the department chair about the goals of the department and resources for new students.

With so much time on our hands on a day-to-day basis, I'm looking forward to getting into research. I check the department directory for professors I'd be interested in working with. My background is in materials, more or less—solids and liquids, those sorts of things. Perhaps I'm overstating things. I spent a summer working for a professor in Hokkaido on carbon nanotubes; that's really about it. Still, it's what I'm grounded in, and I take down the names of a few professors I see are involved in similar research. All around the halls of the building, the professors have posters about their latest works, with the names of students who assisted in the research on there too like they're equal partners. It's exciting. It tells me I can be part of a small breakthrough, too, even in a short time.

I make a note to visit with some professors and look for research opportunities, but there's more to do. I promised Sumi I would start preparing breakfast for the four of us, so I ask around about the nearest market and pick up some eggs, rice, broth, and the like. I'm grateful for the distraction. If I had time to think about what's coming this evening, I might just change my mind.

It really shouldn't be a big deal. That's what I tell myself. It's just Rin. Yeah, she could be intimidating with that stare that seems to go right through you, but that was years ago. I'm a different person now, and so is she, I'm betting. The falling out we had is in the past. I'm sure we've both put it behind us.

When I get back home, it's about five. The exhibition starts in an hour, and it seems prudent to wash up and make myself presentable. I shower again. I put on a light blue shirt with black pants and shoes. I try in vain to get that little tuft of hair on top of my head to stay down, but that's a futile effort. It just makes me feel better. Once I'm sure there's nothing else I can do, I head out, running into Sumi at the elevator.

"Wow, it's been two days, and you've already got a date?" she teases.

I laugh nervously. "It's not like that."

"Sure it isn't. Are you going to be out long? Let me know if you take a look at the classical homework when you get back, okay?"

"I will."

She waves at me as she heads down the hall. "Have a good time, Hisao."

I'll try. I'll definitely try, but with someone like Rin, the way things turn out is hardly predictable.

The walk to Rin's school seems shorter this time than it did before. Maybe it's just my familiarity with the route. Maybe a little anxiety over the affair has quickened my pace. I admit, this is feeling like a bigger and bigger thing than I'd allowed myself to believe. When I left the hospital for Yamaku, I wasn't in a good state—either in body or in mind. Rin picked up on that. She saw I was in a bad place and pointed it out in the most matter-of-fact way, in a way that was very much her own. When I saw Rin falling down her own dark hole, I couldn't help her in return, and it broke her. She helped me, and I couldn't pay her back for that.

It could be I'm going to see her just to get some peace of mind, to convince myself that she's okay after all. Do I really need to visit her to know that? I saw her paintings. I met her advisor. There's still at least one Rin Tezuka on this earth.

No, that's not it, either. I think there's still a part of me that would enjoy a pinch of her presence in my life. I admit I probably tried to get too close to her, and like Icarus to the sun, the experience melted my wings and sent me tumbling down again, but I'm hopeful there can be a safe distance between us—closer than infinity yet further than the event horizon that would consume us both.

As I reach the exhibition building, I see a thin trickle of people entering, and I shuffle into the crowd. Inside, there's an eclectic mix of casually-dressed students and adults in more formal dress. Some of them I take to be professors; others I think must be museum curators or art aficionados. There are a few students better dressed for the occasion, like me, and I catch one of them standing before a pencil sketch and entertaining guests. He must be here to show his work, and Rin's probably doing the same. I head for the back corner of the exhibition hall, with the bright lights already working up a sweat on my brow.

That's when I see her.

Her top is black and a little thick. It's tight, and it hugs her figure well. As I remembered, she's tied the sleeves into knots below where her elbows would be, but that's where my familiarity with her appearance ends. Today, she's wearing a dark green skirt. Her legs are bare, and she walks on a pair of shiny, black open-toed shoes. Her hair is kept in place by a set of red barrettes. Her lips are cherry red and glossy, and touches of light blue eyeshadow adorn her lids.

I have never seen her like this. The girl I knew is gone, and by all appearances, a woman has taken her place.

That's not the only thing about her that's changed. At her side stands Professor Adachi, looking elegant in a full-length beige dress with pearls around her neck. They stand very close together, almost like Rin leans on her. Rin's having a conversation with a visitor, and what strikes me is her level of attention. She focuses on the person in front of her. Her gaze doesn't waver, though her face has a certain level of tension all throughout.

"May I ask," says the visitor, "I understand you experimented with pastels for this piece here. How did you find the process of using them compared to, say, oil or acrylic?"

Rin shrugs. "It's easier to get the colors in my head to come out, but I have to be a lot more careful." She glances left at right at her arms. "I'll have to practice," she adds.

"I see. And about this face here, why did you cut it off across the left eye?"

Professor Adachi chuckles, stepping in between Rin and the visitor. "Really, Mr. Kinomoto, I should think such a direct question on the artist's intent would be well within your talents to answer yourself. You're an art critic, aren't you? The last thing Rin here wants to do is color your expectations of the piece."

Abashed, the man bows slightly in apology. "Of course, my mistake. I didn't mean to put you in an awkward position, Professor, Ms. Tezuka."

Rin's eyes have wandered a bit, but at Adachi's prodding, she focuses back on the art critic and nods in return. After that, the critic politely excuses himself to visit with other students. Rin looks around absent-mindedly while Professor Adachi scans the room.

And catches sight of me.

Should I run? No, it's far too late for that. It's too crowded, and she'll easily catch me. Besides, isn't this why I came here in the first place?

Professor Adachi steps in front of Rin, taking her by the shoulders. "Rin," she says, "do you remember that student from Toudai I was telling you about? The one who was interested in your work?"

I can't see Rin's reaction, but she's as silent as death itself.

"Would you like me to introduce you to him?"

Gently, Rin steps out from in front of Adachi. Her eyes meet mine, and we're both paralyzed in an awkward stupor. Adachi touches Rin's shoulder and lightly eases her toward me. Rin's steps are short, only enough to keep from falling.

"Rin, this is Hisao Nakai, a graduate student at University of Tokyo in the physics department," says Adachi. "He's new in town, and he just dropped by yesterday, looking for some culture." She winks at me. "Am I right?"

"Of course," I say weakly. My throat feels very parched.

"Nakai, this is my student Rin Tezuka. She's in her fifth year of her bachelor of fine arts degree. The studio work needed is quite intense, so I assure you it's not at all atypical for someone like Rin to need another year to finish. In fact, she's my best student. Rin, perhaps you can convert this fine young man to the ways of art? I think he may have a budding interest already." She checks her watch abruptly. "Oh dear. If you'll excuse me, I must go see that the refreshments are being served. Pardon me for a moment."

Professor, I don't think there's a problem with the refreshments, considering there's a cup of ice in your hand. Still, I have to give her credit for being so natural about it.

Professor Adachi leaves us alone, and I'm left with just Rin's directionless stare.

I should say something. I should've planned something for this, something witty or natural or something. But the more I think about it the more I realize the truth:

I have no idea what to do now. It's like the whole idea of this reunion was so distant to me I never actually planned out what would happen, and now I'm in the position to bungle it royally.

"So, Rin," I finally manage to say, "uh, how are you doing?"

Even the vacuum of space has a hydrogen atom or two in every cubic centimeter, which is more than the content of that question.

She shrugs. "I'm fine."

I'm not sure what I expected; that she'd be angry with me for visiting her? Or sad? Or hurt? But Rin is Rin, and only when she was at her most desperate did she show anything at all. Once again, she's inscrutable to me, and I'm forced to come up with questions just to probe her reactions.

"I overheard you with that critic a little earlier," I say. "I guess you answer questions about art now?"

"Only sandy stuff." She hesitates, frowning. "That's not the right word, but it's…sandy. About what the art is made with and how. It doesn't taint perception much, and people want to know."

I nod. "I like your new paintings, too. They're…" I feel bad for saying this, but it's the truth. "They're easier for me to understand. I mean, like this one here." I go to the painting of a bowl of fruit. "I can see there's an apple and a banana and a rotten orange, and it makes me wonder why the orange is out there, all alone, you know? It makes me feel for the orange, I guess? I had a reaction to it. I think that's what I'm trying to say."

It's hard not to have a reaction to it. Oranges were one of Rin's favorite things. To see one wasted and decaying—it must speak to something inside her, some lonely or helpless feeling. I'm hoping Rin might shed some light on this piece's intent, but she doesn't go for it.

"I tried all different styles to see how people would respond to them. Being realistic seems to work best. People seem to understand what's in the art more. Before, it was like a windshield in the rain. You can't see out of it very well."

"Compared to what?"

She blinks. "A windshield not in the rain? Or with wipers. Have you ever heard the sound when wipers drag on a windshield? I think that's the sound that scares me most. I don't usually wake up when I have nightmares, but if I hear that sound, I always do. Do you have a sound like that?"

I stare at her, mouth hanging open slightly, but once again, her wandering gaze snaps back to me, and with it, some of the life seems to seep out of her.

"Sorry. People seem to understand what's in the art more. Let's stop there."

I nod, understanding that much, at least. "I'm glad," I tell her. "I'm happy for you, Rin—that people are starting to understand you a little."

She shrugs again. "They understand the paintings."

What does that mean? I fail to see any distinction between the two. Rin all but told me so when she left. She wanted people to understand her through her work because it was the only language she felt she could speak competently. Yet from her words now, I'm forced to think she must have something else in mind when she paints, but I can't fathom what.

Her mindset has changed, though. That much is clear. She doesn't really look any different—despite the trappings of a woman that she wears now—but there's a lot going on beyond those deep green irises of hers. There always has been. I stare into them, trying to gain some insight.

What I see is the curling of the muscles around her eyes. Her lips turn up, ever-so-slightly, into one of her muted but distinct smiles. "You still get upset so easily, Hisao."

I chuckle a bit, feeling my worries die down. "I'm glad you remember."

"Of course I remember," she says, her gaze starting to wander again. "If I could forget, you'd be talking to a different person right now."

Whether she means that in a literal or metaphorical sense, I couldn't possibly know.

After this burst of chatter from the two of us, we settle into silence. I study Rin's recent works some more, and a few visitors stroll in to talk with her. Some of them are visibly surprised by her lack of hands, but few people directly ask about it. They ask about her preferences in brushes and media, and she answers these questions rather easily, but the ones who ask what a particular piece means, or what Rin was feeling at the time, get a rather curt answer from her.

"I'd rather not talk about that," she says.

It's not elegant, but it gets the job done.

For a while, I feel like I should leave her alone. We've talked, as bizarre as it was, and I don't know what else I have to say other than that I might like to visit now and then. But as the evening wears on, I notice more and more the tension on Rin's face. She's stayed calm and composed when dealing with so many strangers—not like the girl who was so quickly overwhelmed and broke down—but I can see it's taxing for her. Just to keep her eyes still and focused is taking all her willpower.

I touch her lightly on the shoulder, and she flinches, but when she catches my eyes, she settles down. "Why don't we go outside, huh?" I say to her. "It's pretty stuffy in here. I'm working up a sweat being under all these bright lights. I don't know how you do it."

Silently, Rin nods, and I escort her out. Only when we clear the doors to the exhibition hall and return to dimly lit hallways of the rest of the building does she say a word.

"Thank you, Hisao." Her voice is quiet and soft.

"That's what friends are for."

"Are we friends still?" she asks.

"I would like to be."

She says nothing to do that, her gaze fixed forward. I try to navigate my way back to the exit, but Rin abruptly turns down another passage. "Where are you going?" I ask.

"This way is better."

She's like a magnet, and I'm drawn to her pull. I follow, and she leads me to a back exit. It's a small square, with several buildings nestled around a walkway, flanked by overhanging trees. Rin leans against the side of the exhibition building, and I take up a position opposite her, across the doorway.

"There's a pond down the road," she says. "I like to go there sometimes. It's too far, though."

"Have you painted it?" I ask.

She nods. "The pond, the fountain, the whole park. Even when the park changes—when the landscapers trim the grass, or when the leaves fall—it doesn't really change. There are still trees and buildings and homeless people sleeping under blue tents. It's very mysterious."

I think one of these descriptions isn't nearly as picturesque as the others, but I let it pass.

I look to the sky. The light's fading, and I'm not familiar with the city at night. I'd rather head back while there's still daylight, if I'm going to be doing it alone. I'm grateful, though, that we have some degree of privacy here. Maybe that's what was on Rin's mind, too.

It gives me the chance to say something, to part with her again on a different and better note. But what should I say? What is it I came here to do?

Seeing her lean back against the wall in quiet contemplation, I realize the answer:

I wanted to see that she was all right, that she'd coped and moved on, that she hadn't let the past hold her back. By all appearances, Rin has done that. She's beautiful right now; her green eyes have never been more striking. She's successful and progressing in school, and she has an advisor who's keenly attuned to her needs.

But a doubt hangs in my heart. Rin's paintings were always windows into her soul, even if I could hardly see the meaning in them. Her demeanor is often inscrutable even now, but I think of her painting of the fruit bowl, with the orange isolated and decayed. What does that say about what she's feeling? There's a flyer on the door with a cubist face—a logo taken directly from one of Rin's works, too, but half of the face is missing. I can't know for sure, but these pieces speak to me of isolation, of being incomplete, of change that can't be stopped, leading to decay. I can't know that these feelings lie in Rin's heart, though. She was never so transparent as that, and standing with me now, she doesn't betray any distress.

So I say the only thing I can—I make an offer, one she's free to take up or ignore.

"So, I'm in town for a while," I say. "I guess I'm actually living here now. My place isn't far. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes tops? So it wouldn't be any trouble to get together from time to time, if you wanted. If you're looking for someone new to talk to, or if you're having trouble thinking about things, I'd welcome seeing a familiar face."

Rin looks up, her gaze wandering among the trees. "I'll have to think about that." She frowns. "But if I have trouble thinking about that, that might be a real problem. Then I might decide to visit without having decided to visit. Very problematic."

I have no idea what she's saying, but her reasoning is so much like what I remembered. I think that's what I feared the most—that I'd meet Rin and she'd be unrecognizable. It's not so. Rin is still Rin, still herself, in a lot of ways. That's a comfort to me, too.

"I should probably go inside," she says, pushing off the wall.

"Yeah, I need to get going, too. It was good to see you, Rin. Take care of yourself."

She nods, and I turn to head off. It may not have gone exactly the way I expected, but all in all, I think everything went for the best. Rin seems to have found a good place for herself here. That's what counts in the end.

I turn for the nearest road, not exactly sure which way I need to go to get back to the main street, when a voice calls out to me.

"Hisao!"

With the setting sun behind her, all I can see are shadows and her silhouette. She takes a couple steps toward me but stops at a comfortable distance.

"Have you ever painted a mural?" she asks.

I can't say that I have, and as usual, I'm dumbfounded by what comes up in Rin's mind.

"You need a good base first," she says. "A plain layer to work off of, so all the colors come out even. That layer is made of paint, too."

That seems reasonable, I think.

"You still ask questions of me, Hisao."

I feel a pang of guilt at that. I know it saddens her, but I don't know what else to do, how else to understand her.

"But maybe that's okay," she adds, "because when a person tries to understand another, maybe it's like painting a mural."

I'm not real sure what to make of that, and I don't have a chance to ask before the shadow of the girl before me turns to the door.

"Good night, Hisao."

Good night, Rin. I may not be a fortune teller, but I have a feeling I'll be seeing you soon after all.


	2. Discovery

**Discovery**

_Chapter Two_

It's been two weeks since I attended the exhibition, and things are settling down. I'm starting to find a rhythm with classes, but the workload is pretty heavy. Most of the professors give us two weeks to work through our assignments, though, so we're just winding down the first batch. I feel pretty confident about things. While there have been problems I didn't really know how to work at first, I've found most of the other students are at least as lost as I am, which is comforting. The chalkboards in the first-year student offices are awash with partial calculations and formulas, most of which don't even apply to a problem at hand. But that's just how physicists work things out. Keep trying something, even if it's wrong, until you happen on an approach that's right.

I know the hammer's going to drop soon, and we'll get another batch of assignments in short order. Sumi's still at home, working on our electromagnetism assignment, which is due in the afternoon. I've come in early, though, to meet with a professor. He's not any of our instructors. I'm hoping to work with him.

I'm sitting in a chair outside his door, waiting while he meets with an undergrad in one of the introductory physics courses. The discussion is pretty basic—about blocks sliding down inclined planes in the absence of friction—but I remind myself that basic principles are the ones people need to know best, especially if they're going into physics. Fifteen minutes and two broken sticks of chalk later, the student leaves, head buried in his notes, and I knock on the professor's door.

"Excuse me," I say, "Professor Tanaka?"

The man is casually dressed to say the least, with flip-flops over his bare feet and wrinkled cuffs. His stubble is noticeable, and his eyes look red and bleary. He's partially balding, but the rest of his hair is frazzled and unkempt.

He actually reminds me a little of Rin, minus her expectant stare.

"What can I do for you?" he asks me, a bit loudly. "Are you here to learn the magic of normal forces and frictionless motion, too?"

"No, no, my name is Nakai. I emailed you about a position in your group."

"Nakai?" he echoes, puzzled. "Did I write a message to a Nakai?"

I'm not sure who he's asking. He doesn't have a secretary, and I'm pretty sure I just told him he did. He presses his lips together in confusion before hunching over a large laptop. It looks to be several years old, and while the software is modern, I can't help but notice the noise it makes as its fan spins up.

Professor Tanaka puts his eyes right up to the screen and squints, despite his glasses. He studied the information there for a moment before exclaiming,

"Nakai! Yes. Yes. I remember now. You worked on CNTs for a summer with Mayuzumi in Sapporo. That right?"

"That's right," I say. Though really, I don't feel like I did very much. Professor Mayuzumi would shoot x-rays into the carbon nanotubes, and he'd give me the data to try to ferret out what the actual structures of the tubes were. Not that I could even begin to construct that model. I just processed the data and churned out some numbers. He plugged those numbers into a model he created. Like I said, I don't feel like I did very much, but it was tractable work and not difficult to pick up over a summer.

"Well then, you've come to the right place," says Professor Tanaka. "We do some XRD here too, but only a few times a year, when we can get time at the photon source. Most of the time, we're using instruments we've built or bought that we can store here. If you want practical experience and expertise on these devices, I can definitely get you involved. You'll be at the forefront of materials physics here, Nakai."

"It would be my honor, then, Professor," I say.

He shakes his head. "No honor just yet. There's honor when there's a paper to send out; until then, it's all work, work, and more work." He checks his watch. "How much time do you have?"

"Three hours before my next class."

"You'll probably want lunch before that. Still, that's plenty of time to show you the ropes."

"Right now?"

"Science waits for no man, Nakai, not even me or you. We'll start you off small. Come on."

He rolls out of his chair, slips off his flip-flops, and puts on a pair of closed-toed (but equally shabby) brown shoes. He locks his office door behind him and leads me down the hall to his lab. The room is bright and white but with black lacquered tables for working. Like his office, the place is objectively a mess, with boxes of latex gloves scattered about. Still, the other students don't seem to mind. Most of them go about their business, oblivious to our entrance. One student is in a separate room, visible through a doorway. He records notes in a log book and adjusts various controls and dials for a noisy apparatus through a computer. Another looks through a microscope at some kind of sample, but I can't see what it is.

"Here we are," says Professor Tanaka, leading me to a black apparatus. "We can start with the AFM."

The AFM—whatever it is—is slightly bigger than a sewing machine. It has a stage like a microscope for an object to be placed upon, and as I guessed, Professor Tanaka is already preparing a slide.

"This is an atomic force microscope," he says. "Where a conventional, optical microscope allows you to examine an object via visible light, this machine here will drag a sharp-tipped probe over the surface of an object and report the height at various points based on the force the object pushes back with."

"Isn't that damaging to the surface?" I ask. "Or the probe?"

"If you're not careful, yes, but most of the time, we just let the tip oscillate up and down until it encounters the slightest electrostatic repulsion. That's non-contact mode, and if we're going to pop your cherry on this thing, that's the best place to start. Now then, let me find you a good wafer. Or maybe a crappy wafer, since there's always a chance you'll crash the tip."

He fumbles around the lab for a bit, coming back with a small, square, plastic case no bigger than my thumbnail. Inside is a tiny rectangular object—a wafer, I guess—with a small notch in one of the corners.

"The two sides of the wafer are different. One is the carbon-terminated side, the other silicon. If this notch is on the bottom right or top left, it's the silicon face. You can't really tell the two faces apart by eye, so you need to know which is which. Now then, get some gloves on. You're going to need to wash this slide in ethanol, let it air dry, and then place the wafer on the slide."

I diligently work my fingers into a pair of latex gloves. The ethanol is kept in a squeeze bottle with a narrow nozzle, and washing off the slide is as easy as spraying it with the small stream of liquid. It evaporates quickly, and I place the slide on a piece of fiberless paper for safe keeping.

The wafer, on the other hand, is trickier to get a hold of than it looks. With only the plastic tweezers to get at it, it slips from my grasp several times and bounces around the plastic container. I finally wrestle it down and hurriedly place it on the slide before it can get away.

"Now put the slide under the tip."

I do so.

"We can speed things up a bit," says Tanaka, taking a hold of a knob on the right side of the microscope. As he turns it, the tip lowers, and I crane my head around it to see how much clearance is left. He stops with ample room to spare, probably not wanting to smash the tip into the sample. "The computer will take care of things from here," he explains. "It will slowly lower the tip until you reach the specified height. Then, just tell it how much of an area you want to scan." He clicks a few options. "There, now it's in non-contact mode, so you should be safe. I'd start with an image about twenty microns on a side. Try to give me two or three of those. You can actually do a quick, low resolution scan at a hundred by a hundred to look for interesting features and then narrow down to a region of interest. Try to pick out two or three interesting things: faults, holes, stuff like that."

With that, Tanaka pats me on the back, and I'm on my own.

"Make sure to raise the tip before you move the sample!" he calls back as he's out the door.

This is really not what I was prepared for, I have to admit. I didn't expect to be doing anything so quickly, especially with a machine I hardly understand, but the AFM isn't difficult to use. It's not particularly fast, but it's not slow either. I do like the professor asks, starting off with regions about a hundred microns on each side. The resulting images are in false color but striking in that they alternate between high points in gold and low points in black. It's like you can see the individual atoms of the surface.

In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing.

I spot a hole in the pattern of atoms near one corner of the image and clumsily try to move the slide over to center it. Big mistake. When I scan the surface again, I can't find the hole at all. You can't trust a human being to move a tiny wafer that precisely.

That's when I find the offset controls on the monitor, and from that point, it's pretty straightforward. Put in some starting coordinates and let the machine do the work. There's no electrical whirring of a motor or anything like that, but an image forms on the screen, one line at a time, as the probe scans over the surface.

This is pretty cool, but it's also time consuming, and I only find one good pattern of faults in the surface before noon starts rolling around. The lab begins to empty, and I feel like I have to pack up the sample and put everything back in its place before someone locks up and leaves me in here. I print out an image and leave it in the lab notebook to catalogue later.

It's not a bad first day, but I feel like I was no better than a trained monkey in there. I don't really know what that will help us do or why, but then, I can't be expected to know the ins and outs of the whole field in one day, can I? And this printout of the surface of the wafer is pretty cool to look at, if I do say so myself.

Though, looking at the image more closely, I think it might help if I knew which way was up.

#

I have more reason to get out of Professor Tanaka's lab than just fear of being locked up with pumps and lasers and other devices that could be hazardous to my health, though. (And if you think that's a joke, it's not. Our EM professor told a story about a student who found himself driving a shorter stick shift after a run-in with a laser cutter.) I rush to the dining facilities to pick up some breads and juice before the lines get crazy, and even then, I have to fight my way out. I have an appointment to make, after all, even if the person I'm meeting doesn't really do schedules or punctuality.

By the time I get back to the department, she's waiting for me—or rather, she's got her head cocked to the side and is staring at some chalk writing on the sidewalk. It's the 3D Schrödinger equation.

"What does it mean?" she asks, pointing at the equation with her big toe.

That's no simple question. Physicists have been arguing about what quantum mechanics means since before it was even developed. And if you're puzzling over the contradiction in that sentence, you've glimpsed a fraction of what we go through trying to figure out quantum. "It tells us about the motions of particles," I say simply. "An electron or a proton can only move in ways consistent with the equation, not in any other way."

"How rude," says Rin, still staring at the chalk. "Do physicists always have the nerve to tell small particles what to do? Why don't they pick on particles their own size?"

"Physicists don't dictate what the world does. We only hope to describe, as best as we can understand it, the world around us. We're always trying to, even when the mysteries of the world constantly elude us. And we don't give up."

Rin meets my gaze, saying nothing. She just stares and stares, trying to make sense of what I've said. True, there's always a risk of being too subtle with Rin. She has enough trouble understanding people as it is, but I'm also afraid that if I bring up the rift that opened between us directly, it might make her shut down.

So here I am, speaking riddles in the guise of philosophy of science. If Rin gets what I was saying, she doesn't show it, preferring to just stare in silence, and I feel compelled to break it.

"Also, there are no particles the size of human beings."

"Really?" That gets her going again. Rin meets my gaze before closing her eyes in contemplation. "It's not hard to imagine. Just take a big closed loop that vibrates fast enough, and it would look like a particle, wouldn't it?"

Remind me never to introduce string theory to Rin. I'm pretty sure the results would break my brain.

Then again, she might just have the insight to make sense of it and win the Nobel Prize.

This is actually the third time Rin and I have met for lunch since I came to Tokyo. I caught her wandering around the Toudai campus late Thursday the first week, looking lost and puzzled. She said she was just looking around, but what she was looking for she wouldn't say.

"If you want to visit, I guess I could give you a tour?" I offered. "Around lunchtime, maybe next Tuesday?"

She found that agreeable. There was very little actual showing her around since there was "no place in particular" she wanted to see at Toudai, and we settled in to having lunch outside the physics department, largely in quiet contemplation.

It was like going back in time.

On a normal day, Rin looks mostly the same as she did four years ago, too. She prefers a white, long-sleeved shirt, but she's foregone any tie or other decoration. Her pants are usually dark khakis, which hide the occasional spot of paint rather well.

It's amazing, really, how we've picked up with these casual lunches. It's like for four years, we allowed life to carry us with its current, and only now are we able to guide ourselves back to shore and continue where we left off. Here I'd feared that Rin had changed. I see now I had nothing to be afraid of. It's not that Rin hasn't become a different person. Instead, the person she's grown into is still recognizably her, yet subtly different, too.

"Hisao?" she asks.

We sit on a bench outside the physics department building, under the shade of a pair of trees. Rin stares at the sidewalk some more. It must be something that's caught her attention today.

"Yeah?" I answer.

"Why do things like this break?"

I feel like a three-year-old suddenly thrust into the Pacific Ocean after having dipped my toe in a wading pool. With floaters. "I wish I knew…."

Her head rises, and her stare goes through me. "So physicists don't know very much about the world, either," she concludes. "I thought asking why this concrete cracks and breaks would be an easy question."

I follow where her gaze had been just moments ago. The sidewalk in front of us has a noticeable ridge, thanks to the tree root that runs under the bench.

"Oh!" I exclaim, feeling foolish. But then, Rin can make anyone feel foolish at times. "It has to do with stress and strain. Pressure, I guess, would be the easiest word to use. Even concrete can only hold together so long when it's being pressed on. But even if it wasn't being subjected to some kind of force, eventually the concrete would break down, as everything in the universe breaks down. It's entropy."

I suddenly have a sinking feeling. This is not the direction I wanted this conversation to head in.

"Physicists are cynical," she observes.

I chuckle. "How many physicists do you know?"

"Just you, but it seems like the right conclusion until I meet more physicists. I don't know when that will happen, though. I can't see the future anyway, and what you're saying makes sense to me."

"It does?"

She nods. "You see over there, down the road? They were able to patch up one of the cracks, but it's not as strong as the original slab was, is it?"

"Probably not," I admit.

"It hides the cracks and almost makes up for them, but not quite. It almost looks whole, but not quite. Still, it's good enough to walk on, isn't it? It's safe. For most people, that's all that matters."

The patched-up sidewalk may feel safe to walk on, but I feel like I'm walking on eggshells with Rin. What am I to interpret from this conversation? "Rin, what's all this about?" I ask.

"Do you agree?"

"Agree with what?"

"It's safe to walk on."

"Well, yeah, of course."

She nods conclusively. "I think I could be a physicist then. I've been collecting people since I came here, you know. So far, I've met a banker, an archaeologist, an insurance salesman—" She cuts herself off, and a brief, intense look coming over her, rendering her mute.

I've come to recognize that look. I saw it at the exhibition, and it's returned a few times since. When Rin senses she's about to go on a long tangent, she catches herself and tries to think of some other way to get to her point without following the same long, winding path. Sometimes she doesn't see a way around at all, and the detour truly becomes an impasse, but other times, she's able to get her meaning across in a more succinct way. Regardless, it's a strain for her, demanding serious effort. I take it a sign of her dedication, her determination, to make herself understood.

After five long, silent minutes, she continues like she only needed a moment to catch her breath. "Anyway, I try to see what they do and what their opinions are on the world. A lot of people think their jobs are really hard while others' are easy. I think all jobs are hard, but if I can be an artist, then I think I can be a physicist, too, if I wanted to be. But it would be hard. Like driving a tank through a pinhole. You can do that on television, but not in real life." She looks away. "There are lots of things you can't do in real life."

I think it better if we start steering away from that direction then. "So," I say, "how has school been?"

To my relief, she shrugs. "It's been okay. It started off like a beachball when wet, but now it's more like a golf ball."

I interpret that to mean she can get a handle on it, which would be good. She doesn't seem to have much unease talking about it, at least.

"How was your school?" she asks. "Before you came here."

That catches me off guard. It's not like Rin to make small talk. If she's asking, she's genuinely interested, and that puts me on the spot. "It was good," I say, and her expectant stare forces me to elaborate. "Kyoto is an interesting city. There's a lot of history there that I wish I'd made the time to explore, but it's hard, you know? Treating the city you live in like a place you'd want to visit isn't natural. College took some adjusting to, and I admit I struggled at first, but I got my act together in time to find a spot here. The change of scenery hasn't been too much of a shock. I think I'm used to pulling up my roots and settling down in a new place now."

Rin peers under the bench, at my feet. "Oh," she says. "Not real roots. Imaginary roots."

Don't say that to a physicist or a mathematician. They'll think about something a bit more, uh, complex.

"Anyway," I go on, "if not for Kyoto, I wouldn't have had such an easy time settling in here. I'm living with a friend's little brother—well, a friend from Kyoto, that is. Aside from the terribly inapt baseball analogies, he's cool."

"Did you have a girlfriend in Kyoto?"

My jaw about drops. This is uncomfortable territory, and I feel exposed to have Rin asking about it. "A few," I say. "Three. None of them quite worked out, but I'm still friends with two of them, and I don't regret any of those relationships." That's a bit of the simple and abridged version, but if I were really to go into more detail than that, I'd need more than this lunch break, I think. "It is what it is," I conclude. "Not everything works out sometimes."

Rin nods. "I dated a boy once, a few years ago."

"You did?"

"He was a musician, and he composed a piece just for me. He played the piano."

"I bet it was beautiful," I say.

"It made me think I really wanted to have a kumquat for lunch."

I wince. That is so, so very much like Rin.

"I told him that, and we didn't see each other for a while. I think that counts as breaking up."

I think it does, too, and I admit, I don't know what to feel when she says this so flatly. I know Rin has feelings, but it's like there's a scrambler somewhere inside her that keeps most common expressions of those feelings from getting through to her face or lips. I don't know whether to comfort her or let the subject drop. I try for a middle ground.

"Did you like him?" I ask.

"He was kind. And patient. It takes a lot of patience to deal with me."

That's very true. And I'm glad someone else had the persistence to try. There has to be someone who will wander into her life with the magic combination of patience and understanding to make her happy, and I hope she finds that person. I really do.

"The one thing I didn't like so much about him was that he couldn't make me orgasm the way you did."

My eyes go as wide as saucers. Did anybody within earshot hear that? "Rin!"

"Is that what scientists do, too?" she asks innocently. "Do they experiment with women to see what gives them the most pleasure?"

I glance around nervously. No one's wandered by, but that doesn't stop the blush from rising in my cheeks. Rin turns away from me slightly, but far from the impassive expression she usually wears, I see a slight upturning of the corner of her lip.

She has changed. A lot. She's aware of herself, enough to make a joke when the situation calls for it. I wasn't feeling too great just a moment ago, reeling from the weight of past relationships, both mine and hers. We may never have understood well enough to be what we wanted for each other, but we understand enough now to cheer each other up, at least in a small way.

That's all I want to do, all I want to be for her now: a small source of comfort. I can do that. I believe that now.

#

As the day wears on, something stays with me from lunch with Rin. Why did she ask me about my relationships in Kyoto? I mean, I guess it was related, but it really wasn't. And she didn't have to tell me about her last boyfriend, either. Was that just reciprocation? I can't be sure. Rin doesn't tend to think in those terms, but whatever her real motives were, they remain a mystery to me.

In point of fact, I'm glad that she entered into a relationship with someone at all. It means there are more people out there with the persistence to try dealing with her. It'll only be a matter of time before she finds someone she can be happy with, who will understand her feelings exactly the way she wants them understood. Then, she will no longer be the lonely artist crying out for the world to hear her with her paints and inks. She will just be Rin, a person like anyone else.

I look forward to that day. I look forward to it because so far, I've only seen her with Professor Adachi for any length of time.

The afternoon passes slowly. Sumi and I have two classes, neither of which is particularly enjoyable that day. I'm not ashamed to say that. Not all of physics is fun. Most of it is working through awful amounts of math just to get to a result. I'm a lazy guy, though. I don't like brute-forcing my way through a calculation if there's a simpler way. It may require me to learn something new, but I'd gladly do that and engage my mind than go through the tedium of a lengthy, involved calculation. Pages upon pages of math may look intelligent to an outside observer, but most of it is no more interesting than turning a crank.

After classes, Sumi and I go home early. I like to get some work done by myself, just so I feel like I didn't completely mooch the answer to a problem from a classmate. The way these quantum mechanics problems are going, I'm beginning to regret the idea. Exponentials of operators on wavefunctions aren't much fun, and we've reached the point where resources online are pretty scarce. It's probably best if Sumi and I get together to make some headway. She tends to be more willing to ask around for help than I am, so she may know something I don't.

But as dinnertime rolls around, Sumi has yet to knock on our door and summon Mitsuru and me. I wander into the living room and check the clock on the wall, even though my watch is perfectly good.

"She's probably just scrambling to get things finished," says Mitsuru, who's sprawled on the floor, reading comics.

He's likely right. Still, time is a precious resource for us. "I was just hoping we could get together and knock out some of our work. There's quantum due Friday (if our professor doesn't blithely give another extension) and classical due the Monday after. If we don't make some progress soon, it's going to really pile up."

"It'll be fine. I saw you guys when you were grinding out that assignment last Wednesday night. Even down to the wire, you guys get things done. You two are like Matsuzaka at the Summer Koshien Tournament in '98."

I've learned over the course of a couple weeks with Mitsuru that there are few things more important in life than the National High School Baseball Invitational, which is held at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya every summer. Hence, "Summer Koshien." Now, I'm not an ignorant person. I know how popular high school baseball is in this country. Still, it catches me by surprise that anyone could have such encyclopedic knowledge of what's happened at each and every tournament since 1924.

Then again, this is Mitsuru we're talking about. If there were baseball on Mars, he would know about it.

"All right, Mitsuru," I say, humoring him. "What did Matsuzaka do at Summer Koshien in '98?"

"First, he threw a complete-game shutout with 148 pitches," says Mitsuru. "Then, the very next day, he threw 250 pitches in 17 innings, another complete game. He threw 15 pitches the next day, getting the save, and then in the final round, he threw only the second no-hitter in tournament history."

Four hundred pitches in two days. I have to admit, that does sound rather impressive. Even without my condition, I doubt I would've had the stamina or focus to do that. That's a lot of times to be throwing a baseball. And seventeen innings? Isn't that almost two full baseball games already?

"So," I conclude, "Matsuzaka showed an incredible amount of durability and fortitude to work himself so hard in such a short span, and you're saying if Matsuzaka could do it, Sumi and I can, too, in a pinch?"

"Right! See? Isn't that inspirational, Hisao?"

I frown. "What's Matsuzaka doing now?"

Mitsuru flinches. "He went over to America and injured his hip a couple years ago. The last I heard, he was trying to come back to the game after doctors had to rebuild his elbow."

"I thought you said he injured his hip, not his elbow."

"He hurt both."

Mitsuru, I'm sorry to say, but you're terrible at these pep talks.

SLAM! Mitsuru and I shudder. The cabinets rattle and settle down. After that, there's a meek knocking at our door. I turn the knob gently, and I see Sumi outside. Her eyes are wide, and she looks jittery. Maybe if you didn't know her you wouldn't notice, but for the most part, Sumi goes at her own speed through life. Even when she panics over leaving a burner on or forgetting her colored pens, there's a steadiness to her that keeps her easy-going and upbeat.

Except now. She breathes quickly and reacts to every small movement of my hands on the door as I study her expression.

"Sumi?" I say. "What's happened?"

"Happened?" she echoes back. "Oh, nothing, nothing. I just made a mistake." She slaps herself on the forehead for good measure. "I mixed in some vinegar by accident instead of cooking wine, so dinner's fucked up. Do you guys mind if I order out?"

"Sis, what was that noise?" asks Mitsuru.

"Oh, that? I was just pissed at myself. Sorry. Must've rattled you guys."

"It happens to all of us," I say. "I'm fine with ordering something. Accidents happen."

"Yeah. Can I come in? You guys have all the good take-out menus."

I don't know if I'd say that. There are maybe three or four stuck to the refrigerator by magnets. I step aside to let Sumi in, and she takes up the kitchen phone, going back and forth between a few of the menus. She picks Indian, which I'm a fan of, so I don't complain, but when she hangs up the phone, she lingers.

"What were you guys up to before I so rudely interrupted?" she asks.

"Hearing about some guy named Matsuzaka, who blew out his hip and arm in the States," I say.

"A baseball player," Sumi concludes.

"Got it in one."

"Mitchan, what have I told you about distracting Hisao with your stories?"

He salutes sarcastically. "Sorry, Mommy. I won't do it again; I promise."

"Damn right you won't."

She's still standing there, by the door. Usually we'd be in her apartment with Ryou by now. I haven't heard a peep about him, either.

"So, Hisao, what were you doing?" she asks.

"Killing time before dinner," I answer. "After that, I was going to look at quantum some more. Actually, I wanted your help with that."

"My help? I think the chances of me being of any help are pretty slim."

"Don't sell yourself short. You want to look at a problem or two while we wait for delivery? I'll go get my books if you want to go back and get your things."

"Ah, no, that's okay. I've hardly made any progress the last few problems anyway. Do you have any spare paper I can borrow? I'll just work here."

Then it's like I thought. Sumi's being evasive, and the only reason I can think of is that she's not over here just because she messed up dinner. It explains why Ryou hasn't come looking for her yet. He knows she's here. And she knows he's over there. She doesn't want to go back across the hall right now.

Mitsuru picks up on this too, and he's about to say something, but I catch his eye and shake my head. It's just a hunch, but I don't think we should press this. Not yet.

Sumi and I work on an onerous commutator identity until our food arrives. There are four orders, and we eat three of them, leaving the extra on the kitchen counter, boxed up and getting cold. Even Sumi can't help but glance at it from time to time—at that and the clock.

"You need to take that over," I remark. "You know, if Ryou isn't feeling well."

"That's not—" She stops herself, understanding. It's a convenient pretext. We all know we're lying, but pretending that everything's okay smoothes things over, at least right now. "You're right. Let me drop this off real quick. Hopefully he's feeling better."

She takes the plastic bag with the fourth order of takeout and opens the door. Discreetly, I rise from the table and follow her. She goes across the hall for just a moment, but she leaves the door ajar. Even from outside, I can smell soup broth and seaweed. There's rice all over the floor, with pots and pans scattered and overturned on the kitchen counter.

Sumi sneaks in, tiptoeing around the mess, and gingerly leaves the takeout on a dry spot on the counter. She turns back to leave and catches my eyes. There's a brief flash of panic, and then a look I don't expect from her: a pleading, frightened expression. She puts a finger to her lips, and I nod in support. She sneaks back out, and only after the door is closed does she breathe again.

"Sumi—" I begin.

"This isn't your business," she whispers, cutting me off.

"It is. You're my friend."

She shakes her head vigorously, making her ponytail flap around behind her. "Please, please don't. You wouldn't understand."

"Why not?"

"Because your closest relationship was with a girl in high school who ran away from you after knowing you for less than four months?"

I feel a stab in my gut. Sumi's words are like a sword. They pierce me, and they're no defense. If I say anything back to defend myself, it'd be like pulling the sword out, opening the wound even further. Just the stark, blunt reality of her statement takes me back to that rainy day when Rin walked off. I knew then, even if I ran after her, even if I chased her, there was no changing Rin's mind. Even if I stopped her body, her heart and mind had cut themselves off from me.

Sumi's face twists in a mixture of shock and regret. "Oh, oh, Hisao, I am so sorry. It just came out. I didn't mean…."

But she did. At the time, she did. She knew it would wound me, that it might make me go away rather than be stabbed dozens of times by what else she might say.

That's what she did, and we both know it, but if you expect your friends to be perfect, you won't have many friends for long.

"You want to get some air?" I ask her.

Meekly, she nods in silence.

We take the stairs down to the lobby at a slow, leisurely pace. It's less awkward than taking the elevator, I'm pretty sure, even though we go in silence. I think just keeping our feet active keeps our minds off what's been happening, but the spell is dashed when we reach the ground floor. We wander outside the main door to the building, feeling the cool nighttime air on our faces.

The city lights change how I see Sumi. To be candid, I don't think most people would consider Sumi particularly sexy or attractive. She's not especially tall, nor short enough to be considered cute just for that reason. Her complexion is actually a bit poor, and with her hair tied back, her forehead is a large and noticeable. But for all of this, she's always had a sense of surety about her, of direction and purpose. Even when she's panicking over something, she's attacking a problem with all her intellect and strength.

And that's what I liked about her, at one time. I still like it, but in a different way. It's not an uncontrolled fire that's inside her. It's a steady flame.

But the person standing before me isn't sure where to go or what to do. She's pensive and lost. That steady flame is dimming with each second, so I break the silence, trying to save it—and by extension, her.

"Can you tell me what happened?" I ask.

She doesn't face me. She stands by the edge of the sidewalk instead—close, but not close enough that I need to worry. Cars rush by, and the gusts of wind blow through her hair, but she doesn't even flinch. "I've been trying to get him to eat pork," she says. "It's the silliest thing. He doesn't like pork. He'll eat it, but he always complains. So I keep trying to find a way to dress it up so he'll like it. Not too often. Maybe once every other week. Is that unreasonable?"

I don't think so, but it all sounds surreal to me. "You had a fight over pork?"

She shakes her head. "It's not really about pork. I mean it is, but it isn't. You know Ryou just got out of SDF, right? He did his two years in the service, and now he's a free man, able to do as he pleases. Except he isn't because, if Ryou had it his way, he'd still be in SDF, applying for non-commissioned officer courses, but I didn't want that. I had an acceptance letter from Toudai. I didn't want a long-distance relationship. We'd been together since high school, you know? I'd never experienced anything like that.

"So I asked him not to go through with it, to accept the terms of his service and leave SDF. And he did. He didn't argue with it. It was actually pretty civil, at the time. But ever since then, he's been growing frustrated and angry. Frustrated he can't find a job. Angry with me for making him accept his discharge. I'm frustrated, too. He sleeps late. He plays video games, taking time away from filling out job applications. But I know why. It's because his heart's not in it for any of those openings. It's not what he wants to do. And the only reason any of it's turned out this way is my fault."

"Sumi," I say, "I have to ask: did he…? Are you hurt?"

She turns slightly, so I can see one of her eyes. "Did he what? Oh, no, no way. He wouldn't. I wouldn't let him. If he did—" She stops herself, not wanting to think about that. "No. He's holding himself back. He knows that's not the way to fix things."

I nod. She has that going for her at least. Still, I'm concerned. "If he's getting violent, you need to be careful."

"He'll calm down," she says, though I can't make out any confidence in her voice. "He will. He's a good man. Behind that tough exterior he projects, he's a softie. Did you know when he proposed to me, he did a backflip? He was that excited. He just doesn't like to show it in front of others. He's very traditional like that. If he believes he can find something worthwhile in his life, then it'll all work out." She nods, convincing herself. I'm not sure it works, though, so I offer something more substantive.

"I can talk with him," I say. "I was in a pretty bad place after my heart attack. Maybe we can relate. I don't know."

"I'd like that. I think he'd appreciate that, too."

There it is. The steady-burning flame in Sumi's eyes is back. This hope is real, desperate and necessary though it may be. A car passes by, casting her in the glow of two headlights, and she's almost radiant with energy.

"Shall we go in?" I ask.

"Yeah." She goes first, and I open the door for her. "Thanks, Hisao," she says, pausing at the threshold. "I'm really glad you're here."

Me too, Sumi. Me too.

#

I have no real idea what I would say to Ryou on Sumi's behalf, though. I take all the next day to think about it, only to go to dinner and find everything seems to be back to normal. Mitsuru brags about taking out three enemies with one shot of a rocket launcher in an online game, only for Ryou to point out,

"It's easy to take out three guys with a rocket when you're standing right next to them and get yourself killed, too."

Even Ryou can't keep a straight face when Mitsuru fumes over this uncomfortable truth.

When dinner is over, Ryou makes a point of getting Sumi's attention. "It was delicious," he says, rather stiffly. "Thanks, Sumi."

She smiles at him sweetly, and with two sets of dishes in her hands, she leans over and kisses him on the cheek, which makes him go bright red.

"Sumi…" There's a hint of irritation in his voice—from the public display between them more than the act itself—but that's all he shows.

It amazes me how fast things can change. Yesterday wasn't a good day. It frightened me. It frightened me to see what happened with Sumi and how hard on herself she was being, but today, everything is fine, and I don't know what to do. Is this normal? Maybe it is. But it might just be a moment of hope, bright and soothing. Whether it lasts…well, it's too early to tell.

It makes me think back, though. It makes me think about Rin. I remember going about the city with her one night, into the wee hours of the morning. She'd been stymied and frustrated by her work. She needed to get out and experience something, so we walked. We didn't have any good ideas about where to go, but I remember feeling hopeful then, that that was a time we came closer again.

It didn't last.

Still, that was a long time ago. We're okay now. Or we should be okay now. We've been seeing each other now and then for a couple weeks, and we haven't fought or avoided each other. It's been good. But at the same time, there's this whole gap of time we've been avoiding. Neither of us has talked about her departure or what we want to do with the future. Rin probably never would talk about things that way. She's not the type to think consciously and deliberately about what's to come, but I am, and I want to build something that lasts. If whatever we build between us can't last, can't withstand the truth, then perhaps it's better to sever things now.

Before I do something stupid like fall in love with her again. After all, avoiding the issue and letting it fester came up and bit Sumi and Ryou pretty hard.

Then again, maybe it's still too soon. You have to lay down concrete before you try to construct a house on top of it. Concrete isn't that expensive. A house is. If I try to push things too fast, it might do more harm than good.

And I'm reminded of our conversation before. Even concrete, as strong as it seems to be, can break.

In truth, I really have no idea what the right thing to do here is or if there's even a right and wrong choice to begin with.

I struggle with that question all through the walk to Rin's school the next day. After putting in more time at Professor Tanaka's lab, it's my turn to visit her, as we've tentatively established. It's refreshing, to me, to see her more in her own environment instead of mine. As often as not, when she's just around her studio for the day, she doesn't even bother to change out of her working overalls. All she needs to do is wash her feet clean of paint, and she's ready to eat. Some of the paint specks prove stubborn after they've dried, though, and Rin seems to welcome it if I help scrub her feet with water from the studio sink.

On this day, however, the double doors to her studio don't budge, and I knock twice to make sure she's not just zoned in on a painting or something. "Hello?" I ask. "Anyone home?"

"Nakai?"

A voice from down the hall catches my attention. It's Professor Adachi, who sticks her head out from a room three doors down on the left.

"Don't you know not to make a racket when artists are working?" she teases. "What will we do with you, hm?"

I trot down the hallway gingerly, trying not to make too much noise. "Sorry, Professor," I say. "I'm just looking for Rin. Is she around?"

She purses her lips, thinking. "I believe she went to the art supply store. She's very picky, you know. We have an extensive variety of paints in all different colors, but if she can't mix _exactly_ the shade she wants, she goes looking for something closer to what she has in mind. It could be days until she comes back."

I make a face at that. If she's gone that long, won't they have to lock her in the store?

"I kid; I kid!" she says, delighted with my confusion. "If she's not back in half an hour, you and I can form a search party. How does that sound?"

I think we'd be looking for a long while. If anyone is the type to wander aimlessly, it's Rin.

"Come, Nakai, sit with me. A young physicist with such an interest in art fascinates me."

I thought we established I didn't have a strong interest in art in itself. Then again, Professor Adachi took that to mean I had a strong interest in artist girls, which isn't necessarily true either, so it seems better not to correct her.

I take a seat across from the professor, whose desk is largely covered in layers of art books and photographs. There's only a small cleared space for her boxed lunch, which is half-eaten.

"You know," she says, "you and Rin seem to get along quite well. Most people just don't have the drive to get to know her. She's like the pond in the middle of a forest—secluded, isolated, hard to see from a distance, but once you find her, she must be worth the journey."

You're wrong, Professor. The forest of Rin's mind defeated me, too. I just stuck with her longer than others, if that. "So you'd say you know her?" I ask.

She waves me off, like I'm misunderstanding. "Weren't you listening? I said she must be worth the journey, not that I knew for sure. Alas, no, I only know her so well—well enough to pick up on her most obvious cues, but that's all. You could say I can see the pond in the distance, but I still don't quite know how to reach it. I'm not going to stress myself out trying to close that gap, either. Rin moves at her own pace. A snail's pace at some times, a hare's at others. She can be quite frantic when she gets in a mood, and she was in quite a mood when she got here."

"Really?" I ask.

Professor Adachi looks at me sharply. "Why so interested, Nakai? It can't be you've already developed a crush on my young student. If you have, I must warn you. She's a heartbreaker."

That I know well, so I try to come up with a more innocent explanation. "I had a hard time in high school," I explain. "I have a heart condition—an arrhythmia. It caused a heart attack while I was in second year, so I had to go to a school that could handle my needs if something happened again."

"I see," says Adachi. "So that's why you were there."

"Excuse me?"

She waves her hand like it's nothing. "At my cardiologist. I thought it was so strange to see such a young man at a heart doctor. I was sure that's where I recognized you from."

I haven't even been to a cardiologist in town yet, though I do have an appointment for next Monday. It's not something I've been looking forward to.

"Anyway, I guess I'm just saying I know how it feels to undergo a bit of culture shock," I finish. "At the time I changed schools, I wasn't really ready to accept my condition, so that put me in a strange position when I started out, trying to make new friends and so on."

"Different people go about that process differently," says Professor Adachi. "And they take that shock of a new place, a new expectation, in their own unique way, too." She puts her empty boxed lunch aside and rises. "Come with me, Nakai. I want to show you something."

I stand up and follow her. It's actually pretty amazing how Professor Adachi has this voice that almost you do what she tells you. I find myself following her a lot, even when I'm not sure why. Maybe it's her connection to Rin, but it still puzzles me. She's nowhere near commanding or anything like that, but when she makes a suggestion, it just seems like the most reasonable thing to do is to follow it.

"I don't paint much anymore," Professor Adachi admits. "When I do, I do it for fun. My own amusement, under the guise of research. It's really much better that way."

"What made you stop?" I ask.

"Reality, I suppose. Art is no different from any other hobby turned into a profession. There are times you must paint even when you don't want to, at least if you're going to make a living from it. Very few people have the luxury of making money off their work and only painting at their leisure." She frowns. "That's one of the things Rin did not quite understand when she came here. She had an idea, an inkling of it, but I don't think the notion had fully taken to her heart. That's a separate issue, though, and something she struggled with later.

"You see, when Rin came here, she was still technically in high school. The faculty put her on an accelerated study program to get her to pass all her nominal qualifications to get into the undergraduate program. So as a point of fact, art should've been the last thing on her mind while she had other subject areas to pass. But all she wanted to do was paint."

Professor Adachi fumbles with her keys, but she goes on.

"I was away on sabbatical at the time. I don't have many students, and I felt I was getting too old to take on many more, but the faculty here practically begged me to come back and look after Rin. She was that brilliant, that prolific, and…" She sighs. "And that troubled, too."

The lock clicks, and Adachi shows me into her studio. For an artist's work area, the room is actually quite clean. I guess she really doesn't paint here very much. What strikes me most, though, are the paintings hung up on the walls. There's an array of landscapes in one section, paintings of animals in another. Even more works of art take up the back wall, hanging from pins stuck to the windows. Their frames block out some of the sunlight.

"I keep my students' works in here, ones they can't or won't hold on to yet feel comfortable enough leaving in my care," Adachi explains. "Most of these are from students before your time, or before Rin's. Her corner is over here, however."

She leads me away from the door, to a nook that's out of sight of the hallway. What first catches my eye is a series of paintings that run vertically along one corner. In the first, there's a black striped bug hanging from a twig. In the next, it casts its skin away and hides in a green shell. In the third, the shell's darkened, showing a distinct pattern of spots and veins. In the last, a butterfly emerges and flies away into the sunset.

"For a few weeks, she would paint nothing but scenes like these," says Adachi. She points out the last in the sequence. "This happy ending was rare for her, though. Look to your left. That line is her favorite."

To the left is another sequence of caterpillar growth stages, similar to the first, except instead of the butterfly escaping the chrysalis, the pod falls from its anchoring twig and is covered by ants. Their mandibles slowly tear the chrysalis apart.

" 'It shows that even butterflies can fail to change.' "

I blink. "Excuse me?"

"Those were her words," Adachi explains. "And I took them to mean it was a comfort to her, a dark solace she could turn to when she questioned the change in herself. They convinced me how despondent she had become. I couldn't understand why at the time, but I see now she was desperate."

"To have others understand her heart," I say.

Surprisingly, Adachi shakes her head. "I don't think she even dared to hope for that much. She just hoped she could capture some meaning, some embryonic idea, and put it into form with oil and canvass so that others could understand. Anything more than something simple, however…"

I follow her gaze to the opposite wall of the niche, seeing a disorienting array of butterfly wings all overlying one another in a dazzling array of color. What this could mean I can't even begin to fathom.

"The _Growth of a Caterpillar_ series is too simple to capture Rin's mind," says Adachi. "The abstract is more like her. She doesn't paint this way often anymore because it's inevitably met with confusion. Her simpler paintings still contain nuggets of her inner self, I'm sure, but they are only the smallest glimpses of what she herself understands. You saw the painting of the fruit bowl at the exhibition, didn't you? That was from around this time, too. Lonely and isolated, the orange decays, separate from the others."

"They're her favorite fruit," I note.

"Perhaps she was the orange, and she felt herself decaying inside. But if you ask, why did she feel that way? What was the cause? She won't tell you. She can't. Maybe instead it is the loneliness she feels at being incapable of eating oranges on her own. They inevitably go to waste, and she is helpless to change that. You see? Even an apparently simple piece has multiple interpretations, and it leaves us guessing what she really meant. Rin's explanation of the butterfly series is the exception, not the rule. More often than not, only she knows what she means when she paints.

"And even now, there are paintings that Rin doesn't let leave her studio. She uses them to exorcise her own demons. Some people might say it's healthy, that putting such disturbing imagery in work is natural, but that doesn't apply to Rin. Rin doesn't consider it enough to give her feelings form. They must be comprehensible to others. It's like she paints shouting at the top of her lungs, but no one is close enough in the forest to hear. We've had to carry her out of her studio more than once, but I know that if we took art away from her, she would just continue on her own.

"She is my only student right now. I wouldn't dare take another. And as desperate as she is, Nakai, make no mistake: there's more to her than that. When my husband died, she stayed up for days trying to paint something that would help me overcome my grief. She is a very sweet, caring, passionate girl. She just lacks the insight into herself to see that. For my part, my only regret in teaching her is that, as much as I think I understand about her, the distance between the two of us is still very great indeed."

And she's had over four years to get to know Rin, to understand her.

"But!" She brightens, smiling at me. "But, young Nakai, I dare say you've had an effect on her. She's entering one of her bursts of creativity. It is really quite nice to see her get along with someone new. I think the experience really invigorates her."

I say nothing, and with a satisfied expression on her face, Adachi leads me out. My gaze lingers on Rin's small corner of Adachi's studio. Adachi's story has put a pit in my stomach, and it's hard to feel good about it. Rin hasn't had it easy here. I see that now, and to not have realized it sooner makes me feel inattentive and stupid. Rin is still isolated here. She mentioned a boyfriend, but only one, and in the past at that. I just know that before she left I was so frustrated with her. I thought she didn't bother to try to see things from others' points of view. How wrong I was. In a way, that was all she thought about, through her painting and everything else she did.

What Adachi's told me is that Rin basically gave up trying to have anything more than a surface layer about herself be understood. That's why she simplified her painting styles, conforming to established standards and styles. Her pieces now give an impression of her, but only that, and anything deeper is already lost before the paintbrush hits canvass.

It makes me enormously sad. To think she decided to cope with the barriers between her and other people in this way…

I can't let it stand. I want to be a friend to her. I want to do right by her this time. I want to tell her that, even if I can't feel exactly the way she does, I will feel something, some small fraction of what she means.

#

Professor Adachi locks up her studio, and I follow her back to her office. Though I have a good bit of time before my next class, it does take fifteen minutes to get back to Toudai, and I'm mindful of that.

But to my relief, Rin is here. With a bag strung around her shoulder and neck, she fumbles with a foot-activated lock on her studio's door. I trot over to give a hand, holding the door open for her.

"Hisao?" she says, a touch of surprise in her voice. "I should have food," she realizes, frowning. "Why don't I have food? Did I get the food and lose it, or did I never get food at all?"

"Probably the latter," I guess. "If you got food, it'd be hard to lose. Unless you ate your portion and mine all by yourself. You wouldn't do that."

Professor Adachi chuckles, coming up behind us. "Why wouldn't she, Nakai? Rin could afford to put some meat on her bones."

Rin shrugs, contorting her body to get the bag of paint over her head and free. "I don't have as many bones as other people. Doesn't that mean I need less meat?"

"Even by proportion, the same principles hold. Isn't that right, Nakai? You're a scientist, aren't you? Tell her about healthy body weight."

"I'm not that kind of scientist," I protest.

"But you're a scientist and a young man. Haven't you studied the female body in detail? Or do you prefer to hit from the other side of the plate?"

Rin raises an eyebrow. "I didn't know you played baseball. Isn't that stressful for someone in your condition?"

I'm not continuing this conversation. It's like the worst combination of sex talk from someone who could be your grandmother and inapt baseball metaphors. It's like I'm getting double-teamed by her and Mitsuru, and the kid isn't even here.

My stomach growls, eliciting another chuckle from Adachi and a stare from Rin.

"We should eat," says Rin.

"Go to the pond," says Adachi. "There are always street vendors trawling for customers around there. You might even find something fit to feed the birds with."

I don't know if this is supposed to encourage me, but Rin seems amenable to the idea. She slips back into the hallway through the studio door and locks up, looking at me like I'm Moses, meant to lead the Israelites to the promised land.

If you replace _Israelites_ by _Rin_ and _promised land_ by _food_.

We go in silence. Rin leads since I don't actually know the way to this pond, but it seems to be largely back the way I came. The park around Rin's school is scenic in some places and full of culture in others. Trees and grasses mix together with museums and schools, a real juxtaposition of natural and urban environments. It's a mixture, a contradiction, that seems fitting of Rin. I see why she likes this place so much.

As we walk, I find myself watching her, trying to find some hint of her feelings right now, but her face is as impassive as ever. I chide myself silently for even thinking about it. Rin's hard to read most of the time anyway; that much hasn't changed, and more likely than not, she has something else on her mind right now, like how she could've forgotten to get food for the two of us or maybe what paints to mix to replicate the red metallic color of a bicycle that passes us by.

The route by the pond is shaded by trees and lies across a minor road. There's some kind of museum on a narrow stretch over the water. Rin and I walk along the road until we happen upon a yakisoba cart. Cheap, sweet, fried noodles were a staple of my undergrad experience, and they're no healthier for me here in Tokyo, but they do taste good. We settle down on a bench in the shade of a line of trees, with the flat, open space of the pond in front of us and city skyline in the distance. Rin eats a yakisoba sandwich with her feet, and I marvel at how she's able to keep the noodles in the bread even with her only her toes to keep them in place. I doubt I could do that with my hands.

Rin notices I'm staring and stops with the sandwich just a few inches from her mouth. "You look like you found out you're pregnant," she says.

"Say what?"

"What?"

"I mean, why do I look like I'm pregnant?"

She shrugs. "I wanted to say you look like you've never seen a girl eat a sandwich with her feet before, but I've never really noticed anyone staring at me because of that. I have seen someone find out she was pregnant, though, and you looked similar."

"I don't know how I looked, but I can't even imagine how I'd react if I were pregnant, considering the biological impossibility of it for me."

Rin's eyes move to my stomach, then back to my face. "Doesn't seem too hard to imagine."

Well, yes, I should know never to get in a competition to imagine things against you. I'm pretty sure I'd lose that in a heartbeat. I decide it's time I turned the conversation toward what I want to address. "You know, I was talking with Professor Adachi earlier."

"I do know that. I saw you with her. I didn't forget."

"I'm not saying I thought you'd forget. It's a segue, Rin."

She raises both eyebrows, like I've just introduced her to a new intellectual curiosity. "I like that word. Segue. Se-gue." She forms her lips around the consonants and vowels like a small child learning to speak. Once she can say it to satisfaction, she seems pleased with herself, and I continue.

"She told me you had some trouble when you got here," I explain.

That sobers her. Tension rises in her eyes and face—it's that look when she's struggling with herself. "I don't like talking about that time," she says flatly. "We shouldn't talk about that time."

"That's all right. I don't want to talk about that, either. It's just I felt like I gave you the wrong impression, that I just went to college and didn't have any problems. I told you I dated a few girls. It's not nearly as cool as that. I met one girl in a class and lunch with her a few times. Once a week, on Fridays. I was going to ask her out, but she had to bail on me at the end of term, so I didn't. Another girl I did ask out, but we really had nothing in common. I liked her sense of humor, but that was all, and she said no. I did really date someone in undergrad. It lasted for a few weeks, and I thought it was good—good enough that I told her about my heart, just in case, if we went further…but after that we weren't the same."

Rin frowns. "So you lied."

The words stab at me. Even without a harsh tone, Rin's blunt remark goes right through me.

"Yeah," I admit. "I didn't want to sound pathetic."

I trail off, watching her gaze. Though I can't claim to be able to read her fully, I take solace from seeing the hardness ebb away from her eyes. Is it sympathy she's displaying now? Forgiveness? I'm not sure, but since she says nothing, I continue.

"The summer after…you know, after all that—that was the worst. I spent that whole vacation in a blur. I didn't do much. I went home, saw my family. I read books and promptly forgot them as soon as I finished them. I didn't go outside much, and with my heart condition, I had the perfect excuse not to. I floated through those days not really paying attention to anything. I was a zombie."

"A zombie?" she asks. "Does that mean you ate brains?"

"Brains?"

"They're the only way zombies can survive. Or were you a new type of zombie?"

I chuckle a bit. If she's able to think about that, then I can be sure she's not dwelling on darker thoughts right now. That's all I could hope for. "Imaginary brains," I clarify. "Imaginary zombie."

"Oh." She nods in exaggerated understanding, and I go on.

"I was still pretty down about how things turned out when school started up again. Emi and I hung out now and then, sometimes at lunch, other times in town to get tea, but once we got tired of joking around with each other, there was very little left to say, so we stopped doing that. Did she ever try to contact you?"

Rin shakes her head. "She wouldn't understand. I think she knew that."

I nod. Emi had nearly said as much. She was angry at first, angry with Rin for leaving, for being so heartless and pessimistic, but I convinced her that chasing after Rin so soon would do more harm than good. Rin had to figure out her own way through life, on her terms. That was my opinion, and ultimately, Emi accepted it. She gave me a sunny smile—blissfully fake and strained—but a smile nonetheless. It told me that, while she still hurt over what'd happened, she would do her best to put it behind her, and she did.

"Anyway," I say, "I stayed in that funk for the better part of the fall. I got good enough grades that most of the teachers didn't worry about me, but my homeroom teacher, Mutou, did. He took me aside one afternoon, during his science class, and said to me,

" 'Nakai, what are your intentions here? To coast through the rest of the school year and then what? We may not be a typical high school, but like others, we have hopes, aims, and aspirations for our students, and from he who has much talent and aptitude, much is expected. You have that talent, Nakai. You have that aptitude. Perhaps you think, because of your condition, the rest of the world is moving forward while you must inevitably stand aside? That isn't so. Do you know that the biggest and brightest stars in our universe burn themselves out the fastest? It's true. If you really think you're going to die, I urge you to think instead that you have the luxury of not rationing yourself. Unlike the smaller, fainter stars around you, you can burn brightly and make your presence known. You have the stuff within you to do that, Nakai. You're doing well in my class despite going through my lectures glassy-eyed and doodling. It makes me hopeful to see what you could do with your full faculties about you, but only you can make that choice. Every one of your classmates is making choices about their futures every day. What do you want to do with your life? Does it really matter how long you think you'll live?' "

"Wow," says Rin. "You remember all that? Do you know 136th digit of pi also? You must have a really good memory."

I force myself to laugh, for if I didn't, it make come out like I'm exasperated with her. I mean, I almost am because Rin makes it difficult to have a serious conversation, but I know she's not doing this on purpose. She can't be.

"I might've switched some sentences around or changed some words, but that's more or less what he said," I answer her. "And I only know thirty digits of pi."

Rin narrows her eyes. "How boring. I've looked through at least seventy for inspiration at times."

"Sorry to disappoint," I say coolly. "Now, where was I? Oh yeah, Mutou. Well, he didn't really understand what had me down, but his intentions were good, and he was right about a lot of things. Other people were applying to colleges, and I hadn't even thought about it. I didn't have a lot going for me. With Mutou's help, though, we started a science club at Yamaku. It was small—maybe only three or four people by the end of the year—but I got to say I was president of a club for a while. That and good exam marks got me to Kyoto, but I wouldn't have found strength to do that without Mutou's speech to give me a kick in the ass, or without you."

"Me?" asks Rin. "Did I give you a kick in the ass, too? Because I don't remember that."

"Figuratively, yes. You'd gone to go pursue your future, knowing it scared you, that you might change, where I was languishing without any idea what I would do at all. What convinced me to get back on my feet wasn't just a talking-to from a science teacher with permanent stubble. It was you, Rin. You went ahead with something because you thought it was for the best, and it hurt. I know it hurt. I was hurting, too, in my own way. I won't pretend it was the same as what you went through, but that's what I really wanted to tell you today, Rin. I've felt lost and confused and uncertain, too. If that helps you feel a little less alone, even for just a minute—"

My voice suddenly fails me, and I have to close my eyes for a moment just to keep it all in. I didn't want to get emotional about this. I wanted to be hopeful for her and upbeat, but I really was pathetic after she left. I let it get to me. I let _her_ get to me. And all that after I'd resolved not to have my condition get me down anymore. Ironically, it didn't. She did so much to help me forget about it, even by her departure. I want to thank her for that, too, but how can I put that into words? How can I put anything else into words without my voice cracking, without breaking down in front of her? This girl shows so little, and I'm afraid to show any more.

I wanted to be like her, at one time. I thought she just shrugged everything off, that she was immune to angst and despair, but that wasn't true. We were more alike than I'd realized, and I only understood that too late. She doesn't show it, but there's so much going on behind her eyes. It's the one thing that makes me feel connected to her.

And I want to be connected to her. It frightens me. It scares me, and I'm more than a little afraid that this friendship we've rekindled is fragile, that it may be extinguished by a sudden gust of bitterness and sorrow before I've even had a chance to bask in its warmth.

Poke.

I nearly jump out of my seat, but it's just Rin's big toe poking my ankle.

"Sorry," she says. "I didn't mean to surprise you."

"It's okay," I squeak out, and I clear my throat once to compose myself. "I started thinking too many thoughts at once. I didn't know what to do, what to say anymore."

She looks at me for a long second, appearing surprised, before she turns toward the water, staring with an unreadable expression again.

"Then maybe," she says quietly, as if she's afraid to say it any louder, "just maybe, you do know how I feel."

Only then does she allow herself a small, cautious smile. It's not a happy smile, though there is some joy in it. It's one of commiseration, of relief and realized longing. It convinces me of something, of a feeling that now seems unavoidable.

I think I'm in love with this girl. I've fallen for her all over again.


	3. Distress

**Distress**

_Chapter Three_

"So, when do I get to meet your girlfriend?"

I look up from a diagram of a conducting plate and a point charge. Sumi's brow is creased as she stares at her own notebooks, but that's only because she thinks looking away from me will help her keep a straight face.

It doesn't work, by the way. I can see the dimple on her left cheek as plain as day. At last, she relents, but she isn't done giving me grief.

"Why, Hisao," she says, looking at me with a sly grin, "have I rendered you speechless?"

I try to maintain my cool, huffing like the question is beneath me. "I just didn't hear anything I had to answer."

"So that means I'm inviting her to dinner next Tuesday and introducing her to Ryou and Mitchan as your girlfriend."

"You wouldn't!"

"I totally would."

Damn it all, I've lost. Rule number one of dealing with Sumi: don't let her teasing get to you. I failed as soon as I took her outrageous suggestion seriously. Still, the commotion has the effect she desired. If this were a private conversation, I doubt she would be so keen on toying with me.

But as it is, we're in her office space, with plenty of our classmates ready and willing to serve as an audience.

"What's this?" Jirou turns from his desk and rolls over in his chair. "Hisao has a girlfriend? You must be a smooth operator. Give me some tips. Man, talk of chasing girls makes me feel like I'm ten years younger. All I need to complete the illusion are pimples and greasy skin."

I shrug. "Sumi's got those parts covered."

She punches me in the arm lightly, gasping in mock horror. "Just remember, Hisao, I cook your dinner."

"And I cook your breakfast."

"A girl can skip breakfast. It maintains my figure."

"What figure?"

That elicits a glare, and Jirou can't help but snicker. "Hisao, you've got to stop. You're halfway to Africa and just digging deeper every second."

"I'm not her husband; I'm not obligated to say she's attractive."

"Honestly!" says Sumi, folding her arms. "You're actually going to make me put on make up, do my hair, wear lipstick, and put on leggings, aren't you? I will come here dressed to kill only to get chalk on my clothes and papercuts on my fingers. Is that what you want to see?"

Michel the Frenchman turns from his desk behind me, nodding in appreciation. "If Hisao doesn't say so, I would, but you don't need to do all that to be attractive, Sumi."

"Thanks, Michel. At least _someone_ here can appreciate that."

I catch Michel's eye. "Should you really be saying that? You're married, and so is she."

He shrugs. "Saying that doesn't mean I don't love my wife. And I do. She isn't often in the mood for it, but when she gets into the lace…" A reserved, yet giddy smile comes over him, but he quickly recomposes himself. "Well, I don't really need to go into those details, do I?"

I hope not. I think most of us can imagine what comes next.

"Why all the interest in Hisao's supposed girlfriend?" Michel asks Sumi.

"Because she sounds really cool. She goes to the art school and paints with her feet."

"She does what?" asks Jirou. "I want to see that. I'd _pay_ to see that. Why does she paint with her feet?"

"Because she—" Sumi stops herself, glancing at me. "Ah, Hisao, is that okay to say?"

I nod. "She was born without arms. That's why."

Jirou makes a face. "Then I'll close my wallet because otherwise, I would look intensely patronizing." He nods a couple times to convince himself. "Still, that's really amazing. How did you meet her?"

"We're actually old friends from high school," I explain. "We, uh, had a falling out at the time, but now we're okay. I think we're okay."

"See, Hisao won't say so, but I think it's a great story," says Sumi. "It's really incredibly sweet. It's not every day you get a chance to rebuild an old friendship."

I snort. "I thought you said she was my girlfriend."

"You know I'm just teasing. But I would definitely like to meet her."

I won't say no to that. Still, hearing about Rin and meeting her are two entirely different experiences. I suspect Sumi would be surprised with Rin and her behavior, her way of thinking. That said, Sumi is an accepting person. It might be fun, and it would be a good opportunity to spend more time with Rin.

I don't want to make things move too fast, though. I do have feelings for Rin—strong feelings, at that. But I don't want to make the same mistakes I've made before. I was impatient back then. I thought Rin was toying with me. Now, I realize she may not even be capable of such behavior. What she says can be bewildering, but her every action is sincere. I doubt Rin sees the point in deceiving people, or maybe she doubts she's adept enough with words pull anything like that off.

Either way, I'm left to ponder the possibilities of a dinner with Rin and Sumi's family while Sumi and the others go back to toiling over image charges. Their work and my daydreaming are interrupted, though, by a sudden knock on the office door.

"Excuse me," says a familiar voice. "I'm looking for a student here. Hisao Nakai?"

I slide my chair around the edge of the divider, showing my face to the door. As I thought, an old woman in stained overalls is standing there, looking more weary and taxed than I'd ever seen her.

"There you are," says Professor Adachi. "I went to your office, but you weren't around."

"Ah, yeah," I say. "This one is, uh, more lively."

Adachi looks miffed with my lame explanation, but she lets it pass. "Are you busy, young man? I had no other way to contact you."

At that, my heart sinks. "Did something happen with Rin?"

"Come along," she says. "I'll explain on the way."

#

Being a university professor has its perks. You can park at a nearby college just by flashing come credentials, and if a graduate student goes with you, no one will bat an eye. You can leave and abandon any classes you might have to teach for the sake of one of your students, and you have a great deal of leeway to do so.

All I know is this: Rin is not well.

"It's not the first time," Adachi says, shaking her head. "I've seen her carried out of that building more than once, grasping for paintbrushes with her toes as medics laid her out on a stretcher. It's been two days since she came out of her studio. Every time I have to use my key to get in with her inside, I have to make a note of it. Artists are known to be eccentric, but the school will put up with only so much. I'd rather keep this quiet, for Rin's sake, and I hoped you could persuade her to come out."

But I've only known her this time around for a few weeks. What could I say that her advisor of over four years can't? "I'll try my best," I tell her, "but if you can't convince her to come out, I don't know if I can."

"Nonsense, Nakai. You're very important to Rin. You always have been."

I look across the car, studying her expression, but she seems intent on watching the traffic around us. "So you know," I say.

She nods once, solemnly, grimly. "She's told me very little about her life before coming here, but I knew some things about you—your name, your face, and how special you are to her—before ever I spotted you outside the exhibition door. And like a meddling old grandmother, I thought rekindling an old connection would be good for Rin. For too long, I've felt like she's been drifting—going through the motions with only the vaguest sense of purpose. You helped her find something she cared about again, but I should've known better than to get involved in something I didn't fully understand. Nakai, you and she—the two of you didn't part on good terms, did you?"

"Her choice to come here was a choice to go away from me."

She bangs a hand on the steering wheel in disgust, hissing. "Oh, what an old fool I've been," she admonishes herself.

We pull up to the studio building, and Professor Adachi hurries inside. I follow her past her office and to the paint-stained double doors of Rin's private workspace. The door is locked, and even the foot release won't respond. Professor Adachi glances down the hall, checking to see if anyone might be listening, and bangs on the door with her closed fist. "Rin!" she calls out. "Someone is here to see you. Won't you please open up?"

No answer. The cold, rusty doors are almost as good at staring back blankly as Rin is.

"Rin, it's me," I say, trying to sound cool and collected…and probably failing miserably. "Professor Adachi is really worried about you, and so am I."

I hear a soft sound inside—maybe it's a paintbrush being put down? The lock mechanism in the door clicks, and with a push of her foot, Rin opens the door. She looks at me with a dazed expression, hardly concealing the bags under her eyes. Her overalls are vivid with fresh paint stains, and some strands of her hair are nearly standing on end. I want to look around her to see what she's been painting, but something about the situation already has me unsettled.

Rin's gaze is fixed right on me, and she's _smiling_.

"Hello, Hisao," she says, her inflection as neutral as ever.

"Hi. So, uh, what have you been up to?"

She glances down, at her stained overalls, and back at me. "Painting. Isn't that obvious?"

"It is, but I mean, what have you been painting?"

"Myself," she says, her smile broadening. "I'm painting myself again."

She steps aside enough for us to enter, and Adachi and I trade puzzled glances. For someone supposedly in a desperate, isolated state, Rin is unusually perky today, and that's a word I never thought I'd use with her.

Well, unless she'd found some codeine again. Maybe I should check to see if there's some around here. If there is, though, I doubt I'd be able to find it. Nearly every half the floor space is occupied by a paintings on frames, all in various states of drying. One looks like a large calendar, amazing in the precision of the lines and dates, except the symbols for the numbers of the days make no sense. They don't look like any set of numerals I know of. Unless they're ancient Babylonian (which I wouldn't put past Rin), they seem like nonsense.

"What do you think of it?" Rin quickly asks, weaving through the mess adeptly. She's surprisingly agile, even in this state of sleep-deprivation.

"Ahh…is it something to do with how time is incomprehensible?" I offer.

Rin stares in response, and her enthusiasm fades slightly. She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't have to. I know I haven't hit the mark.

Professor Adachi clears her throat. "Rin, do you know how long you've been in here? You need to eat. You need to sleep. We've talked about this before. Don't you remember?"

"I forget things." She looks at me quickly. "Not all the things, but lots of things." She looks back at Adachi. "There's too much inside of me right now. It's like a pot of gold. You can only put so much inside a pot of gold before it overflows. I can't eat. That would put more gold inside of me. I can't sleep. Then it would all stay there. I'm close though. Really very close. Each time I think about it, I feel like I'm halfway closer than I was before, so it won't take long. There's a leprechaun coming soon."

Combining Zeno's paradoxes with Rin seems like a recipe for great headaches. I try to push the thought out of my mind, realizing I've rather hemmed myself into the studio, having stepped over paintings on the floor, only to end up on an island with nowhere safe to go.

Rin pays my plight no mind, though. She hops adeptly around the drying canvasses and points out one painting with her big toe. "What about this one?" she asks.

It's a human heart—and not idealized or symbolic like most hearts in artistic work are. It's very realistic in terms of the shape of the heart and the structures of the arteries and veins that connect with it, but there's more. For the lungs, the painting slices through, showing a cut-away of bronchi, except where the bubbly alveoli should be, the branches of bronchial tubes end in yellow flowers—a series of dandelions.

"Well, it's a heart," I say. "Is it my heart?"

Rin nods, but I get the feeling there's more.

"I mean, I don't really follow the rest of it. I don't have dandelions in my lungs."

She frowns at that, and her stare breaks off from me as she considers that remark. Frankly, I'm a bit shaken just thinking that Rin would paint me or something about me. It makes me feel exposed. Here it's not so bad; no one would be able to tell whose heart that is on the canvass, but it still puts the thought in my mind.

Back by the doorway, Professor Adachi navigates the drying paintings to reach Rin. She takes the weary girl by the shoulders and leans over to meet Rin's eyes. "Remember, Rin? We talked about this before. You can't keep doing this. If you do, you might not be able to be an artist anymore."

"I'm not sure I am an artist," says Rin. "I've tried to be. Are artists okay with their work being misunderstood?"

"It's a risk we accept. Isn't it better to reach out and make an idea or a feeling known than to hold it in?"

Rin cranes her neck, glancing at the ceiling. "I haven't decided yet. It's like talking over a bad radio. There's always static. The words and thoughts are heard, but only garbled. I thought if I kept things simple, that would make it easier, but I don't know if I like that. Simple isn't enough anymore." She looks over her shoulder, at me. "But Hisao tries. Even though he said it was futile, he tries. People don't always say what they mean. That's why I'm not like people, but Hisao tries to understand me anyway. He knew what I felt once. He can do it again."

That's what this is. Rin isn't isolating herself because she's throwing herself into her work. It's like Adachi said—Rin kept herself bottled up, pessimistic that anyone would understand her if she let he feelings out. Now, with what I said when we went to the pond, she's willing let all that out of her. She wants me to look at these paintings and tell her I feel what she felt.

And I don't know if I can do that. The only reason I knew what she felt was from Adachi's explanation, her reasoning about Rin's behaviors. She's had four years to figure Rin out. I've only had a few weeks.

"Rin," I say, "I can't promise you I'll look at any of these works of yours and know what you felt or what was inside you. There's no way I could promise anything like that."

She stares at me, puzzled and surprised. "Why do you say that? Why are you saying that again?"

"Because it's true," I tell her. "That doesn't mean I won't try. There just aren't any guarantees."

That seems to take some of the energy out of her. She slumps a bit, looking down at her feet and wiggling her toes. I try to step over some more paintings, but something on the floor catches my eye. In the years since she left, Rin has managed to master photo-realism, and I wonder if she really keeps all the details of a place in her head as vividly as when she first saw them. What catches my eye here is the group of three brick buildings in the background, connected to one another to form a shared living space.

That, and Rin and I are in it. It's the day she left me. The cloudy skies, the street light dripping with rainwater—the whole scene chills me.

What's worse is that the scene isn't the way I remembered it. The Rin in this painting is crying. I know for a fact, I remember too well, she didn't shed a tear. Even at her most despondent, when her words could freeze my blood, the most she expressed was muted disappointment and longing. She said she had to force herself to emote—to smile or to laugh. They didn't come naturally to her, but all along she was trying to fit in, to look normal in how she acted.

I doubt she could force herself to cry with open eyes.

But there are other paintings here, too—all variations on the same scene. In another, I chase after her. In another still we kiss. In a third, her limp sleeve makes contact with my cheek. It's the closest she could ever come to slapping a person, I expect.

And I have no idea what any of this means. I really don't. Are these things she wanted to do but couldn't? Did she imagine that last meeting playing out differently, wondering what she could've done to get a better result? What would've been better for her? If I'd told her I could've understood her after all—I don't know if I can do that. I don't. I want to so badly, but I don't want to make an empty promise to her, either.

There is a middle ground, right? That I may not be able to understand her completely, but over time, I could pick up bits and pieces? Bah. That middle ground seems awfully narrow right now. I look at these paintings, and I couldn't say with any certainty what they mean. There's a significance here only Rin can appreciate. Only Rin knows what she intended here, and I try to choose my words as carefully as I can to probe at that meaning without putting her in a situation that she can't explain.

I hold up one of the frames. "What is this?"

Professor Adachi winces, but she doesn't look surprised. I see. That's how you know me, Professor, isn't it? You've known from the moment we met how Rin and I parted. I could never tell someone all the details of that day. I could say matter-of-factly Rin departed for Tokyo and that was it, but Rin's attention to the scene, to the complex emotions on our faces—it's unsettling. It makes me anxious. Rin can put her own soul in her paintings, but here, she's put a big part of mine in one, too. How could she do this? How could she leave these out for anyone to see?

"Rin," I say again, getting her attention. "Can you answer me or not?"

"It's a painting," she says. "You didn't develop an eye problem while in college, did you?"

"No, I didn't develop an eye problem. I didn't go blabbing to everyone I met how the first friend I made at Yamaku ran away from me, either."

Her lips part at that, and she looks at me, agape. A chill goes through me. This isn't right. This isn't what I want to be saying. The bitter edge in my voice is threatening to rip us apart. So I take a second to breathe, to let my irregular heartbeat settle down, and I try to be as reasonable as I can be.

"I look at this painting and the others, and I don't understand yet. I'm trying to, and I'm having a hard time. Is there something you can tell me, something that get me started in the right direction?"

She stares intently at me and the painting, and the silence between Rin, Professor Adachi, and me is tense and terrifying. I just hope that whatever she says, it's something I can make heads or tails of.

"Nothing," Rin finally says.

"Nothing?" I echo.

"It doesn't mean anything."

What?

How does that make any sense?

"You can't be serious," I say. "Rin, you tore my heart out and left it beating on the goddamn street that day! And you say it means nothing to you?"

She turns away, planting her foot conclusively when she's done. "You don't understand. I can't explain it to you, and you don't understand. I told you it would be easier if you hated me."

You're right; I don't understand. That moment must have some meaning to her. She wouldn't care about my anguish otherwise. But to say it meant nothing…!

No, no, I need to fight this. I need to fight this rising adrenaline in my veins. Rin wouldn't have said that unless she meant it, unless it somehow made sense to her in her mind. There's only one person who doesn't understand that here, and that's _me_. And if I stress out about trying to understand that right now, in this moment, I may say even more that I'd always regret.

"Rin, Professor, please excuse me," I say, stepping over the last few paintings between me and the door. "I think it's best if I take my leave now. I don't think I'm of much help here. Sorry for disappointing you."

Professor Adachi looks ill at the remark, but she nods in acknowledgment. Rin watches me all the way out, and only when I look back at her and meet her gaze does she let her eyes wander. After all the time we spent rebuilding our friendship, I realize I still don't really know how she feels. I may never know. Does that mean pursuing a friendship with her is inevitably fruitless? Or can something good still come of it?

I don't know how to answer that, either.

#

Ever since my heart attack, I've used books to take me places, to pass the time, to find a diversion from the stresses of life. Books may be the only way to go to the stars faster than the speed of light, at least in our lifetime, so I'm very fond of them. Since meeting Rin, I've taken to drawing some of the scenes from my reading, to give them the form I see them in. I've sketched monoliths in the margins of my notebooks; I've discarded entire pages trying to sketch a gigantic, four-armed creature that roams impales its victims on a metal tree of thorns. The ideas may be disturbing, but still, there's a level of insulation from the real world. What happens in the pages doesn't creep back into everyday life.

Not like Rin's paintings. Everything troubling and disturbing in them seems too connected to real life.

I don't know what to think about any of that. I don't want to think about any of that. Rin had hopes that I could see into her soul after all, and I let her down. There's this impassible chasm between us, and if I try to leap across, I may end up falling instead.

Give it time. That's what I tell myself. Give it time. Don't push things. Let them develop the way they will and be happy with the results. It all sounds so easy. These thoughts may be further divorced from reality than the Time Tombs of Hyperion.

I'm not venturing into the world of aliens and androids today. My destination is a bit more worldly, though no less interesting. It's the time of Emperor Meiji's reign, and it seems appropriate that the unnamed narrator of this piece is in university, just like I am. He's made friends with an older man, whom he calls _Teacher_ and who lives in seclusion with his wife. Teacher is a distant, aloof man, and he has secrets.

The book feels a bit otherworldly, as the narrator feels increasingly distanced from his family under Teacher's influence, and while the story could happen at any time—love triangles are eternal, after all—the backdrop of the end of the Meiji era puts it in the context of great impending change. The transformation of this country from an isolated, agrarian society to a modern, industrial one took place over the course of the emperor's life, and his death is symbolic of the death of the old ways and old lines of thinking.

I like my reading to take me away from my problems. Everyone needs time to think about things, but the more I read, the more I realize I'm delving deeper and deeper into something I'd put off. The only reason I have this book is because Sumi was reading it, because I offered to do something that we could share in together outside of schoolwork. The only reason she had it is because her husband gave it to her.

I leave my desk and glance down the hall to the apartment door. Just across the way is Sumi's door, and behind that, Ryou is probably inside, playing video games. He hardly leaves Sumi's apartment, even on weekends. He conducts his job applications from home—if he does them at all. He doesn't get dressed for our dinners, and he says little. He's physically present and near us, but he feels far away, as far as the narrator in this book and his Teacher from the rest of humanity.

I think Sumi fears that, too. That's why the book is a touchy subject with her.

I promised her I would try to talk to him, but at the time I didn't know what to say. I think I do now, though, and I'm going to do it. I'm not letting another friend down.

I tuck the book under my arm and go across the hall, knocking on the door. The echoes of my knuckles on the door die down, and only after a minute of silence do I hear footsteps inside. Ryou yawns and scratches at the back of his neck, puzzled.

"What's going on?" he asks. "Sumi isn't home."

"Yeah, I know. I had to leave early because of…something. I wanted to talk to you."

He frowns at that, looking even more confused. "You want to do what?"

"It's…ah…"

His stare is hard and piercing. I can't just talk to this guy. I need a reason. If I say, "Hey, Sumi and I think you're falling off the deep end and need help," I don't think he'll take it very well.

"Mitsuru isn't around," I say, "nor Sumi. If I have an issue with my heart, I'd be in some trouble."

"I'm trained in basic care," he says, but his gaze darkens. "Or I was. I'd do what I can to keep you kicking until an ambulance gets here. Don't worry about that."

"Oh. Okay. Good. It just makes me nervous sometimes. Ever since I had my heart attack, it makes me feel on edge sometimes. I'm not really like everyone else. I have a vulnerability most people wouldn't think about, wouldn't understand."

He scoffs at that. I'm not sure what he finds funny, but it loosens him up. He wanders from the door, and I walk in. There's a game on the television, stuck on pause, and he sits down by the controller, but he doesn't go back to playing. He just holds the controller for a moment, lost in thought, and I sit down across from him.

"I had my heart attack when a girl told me she liked me," I say.

"Seriously?"

I nod. "Guess I couldn't handle it."

"That had to suck."

"It did. I was stuck in the hospital, and as the weeks went by, I realized that I wasn't just going to heal from this. It was permanent. It wouldn't change. That really stuck with me. All the days started running together. In the hospital, weekends and weekdays were the same. Get up, run tests, read a book to pass the time, run more tests, have a meal brought to you. Nothing ever changed, except when I had visitors. My parents visited sometimes. My friends, too. Even the girl—she actually came by quite a bit, but we never talked about what'd happened. But eventually, they stopped coming."

"It happens in SDF, too," says Ryou, shaking his head. "A guy gets injured, and people come visit for a while, but if it lasts too long, they go back to their lives. They can't keep caring about it anymore, so they just stop, but if you're the one injured, you don't have that option, so you're left behind."

"That's exactly how I felt. I was abandoned; I was left in that hospital while other people went on like I wasn't even there. Even the girl stopped coming, though she was the last to stop. I got shunted off to a new school, a school for people with _needs_, like I different from normal people. I felt like I was sent off to be swept under the rug. Even my parents didn't say goodbye, really. They set up my things there and left before I even arrived."

Ryou puts down the controller, pensive. "So what did you do?"

"I went along with it. I didn't see that I had a choice. It was the only option. That didn't mean I was happy about it. I wasn't. But I met a girl at that school, a girl who was born with no arms but could paint and eat and dress with her feet. To me, she seemed entirely unconcerned with her condition, and all the problems associated with it just bounced off her. I thought that made her unique and strong, but that was desperate part of me looking at her, the part that didn't think I had that in me, you know?

"She saw how sad I was. That I didn't smile, that I just coasted through each day in a trance, trying to get by. And when she told me what she saw, I realized everyone else could see it, too. My classmates could. My friends back home had. One by one they'd left because they couldn't do anything for me, or because they saw me falling and felt responsible for it, or helpless to stop it. When you feel like you're going to drown, trust me—everyone else can see it. And unless they're uncanny about it, they're not going to know what to do any more than you do. But it's going to weigh on them all the same."

Ryou doesn't say anything through my little improvised speech. He mutes the television at one point, but that's a pointless gesture—it's already almost silent anyway. He seems to think about what I've said pretty hard, his brow creasing, his hands folded in his lap.

"I'm not drowning," he mutters. "They taught us that. Ocean or fresh water, they taught us how to swim. Even with our ankles and wrists bound, they taught us how to survive that." He scowls, rubbing his temple. "They didn't teach us how to get through this, though." He tosses the game controller aside and looks to the door. "You know, Sumi thinks it's easy. Fill out an app, and someone, she thinks, will accept me. It's not that simple. I've looked at dozens of jobs—as a policeman, a firefighter—but they all take time and qualifications. I don't have either, and even if I did, they'd feel…I don't know. I'm useless here. You know Sumi. She's an amazing girl, isn't she? Smart, funny, playful. There's no one else like her. She's doing physics. She's going to make discoveries. She's the kind of person that could change the world, and I believe that. I thought in joining the service I could change the world, too." He holds out his hands helplessly and gestures toward the screen. "Now, I can't even beat this level with the damn Jackal snipers. She's out learning how to win the Nobel Prize, and I can do nothing but wait for my future to materialize, whatever it's supposed to be."

"You're not used to waiting," I observe.

"Waiting for orders, maybe. But even then, most days had a clear structure. You had duties to perform, and you performed them."

"Now you have to choose for yourself what you do."

He nods slowly, taking a lot more meaning in the words than I think even I intended.

The lock in the door grinds against its mechanism, and Sumi adeptly steps inside, looking relieved. "That was awful," she announces, rubbing her eyes behind her glasses. "There had to be at least six of us all working on one problem, and no one—not even the professor when we ask him—has any fucking idea what's going on. Whoever thought putting a step function on a conductive plate needs to die."

She opens her eyes and blinks, looking between the two of us.

"Oh," she says. "Hey, Hisao. How's your friend?"

"Not as bad as I thought she might be," I answer, "but she's still troubled. I guess that's the right word for it."

"I'm sorry to hear that." She puts her purse on the counter, steeling herself. "So, you guys have been talking?"

"Not really," says Ryou. "Nakai was just telling me about some stuff."

His body language is different. Stiff, guarded. It makes him look stronger, more formidable. He wasn't this way at all just a few minutes ago. He was relaxed and contemplative, talking freely. But this is actually more like I'm used to seeing him—gruff and stony. Something's changed here.

Something's changed because Sumi walked in the door.

"I said a few things about some trouble I had in high school," I clarify. "Difficulty adjusting."

"I see," says Sumi. "Was that of any help to you, Ryou?"

He shrugs, taking up the video game controller and hitting a button to leave the pause menu. "Dunno what I would need help with."

Sumi stares at him. "Finding something new to do," she says, her voice betraying a slight edge, but she maintains a composed facade. "Adjusting to things."

"Maybe what I want to do," says Ryou, "is go back and reenlist in SDF."

At that, Sumi's steady face breaks into a thousand pieces. "You want to do what?"

"There's a window for me to reenlist and be expedited back into the Force. What if that's what I want to do? What if I want to make that my career, maybe even go to school to become an officer?"

Sumi narrows her eyes. "We talked about this. There aren't any SDF bases within an hour of here. Do you feel like you've really tried to look for anything else? Even if you had to go to fire science college before you could be a firefighter, what's wrong with that?"

"I could take a whole bunch of classes and end up with nothing to show for it?"

I need to interject here; there has to be some way to defuse this situation. "Let's calm down here. You guys can find a solution you're both in favor of. Ryou, you can be a little patient, right?"

"You think so?" he asks. "You think I should wait around and languish, becoming pathetic the way you did, Nakai?"

"Don't insult Hisao for trying to help out," says Sumi, her voice measured but stern.

He pauses the game, glaring at me, and then at Sumi. "This isn't his business. The only reason he's here is because of you, right? Or because you asked him come? You did, didn't you?"

"You needed a kick in the pants," says Sumi. "I felt Hisao could do that, in his own way."

BANG! Ryou slams his fist on the table, and it rattles with a sickly, awful sound. "I don't need a kick to anything or anywhere! I'm doing just fine. And you, Nakai—I don't want to see you for a while."

"Ryou!"

"I don't need people butting into our family business," he insists, going back to the game. A deadly bright laser beam zips by on the screen, and the faint, high-pitched buzzing is all that breaks the silence.

Sumi looks at me apologetically, her expression pained. She mouths _I'm sorry_ but does nothing more. It saddens me to look at her—angry, helpless, and bewildered, but I give her a weak smile like I understand and step out.

I don't know what will happen now. I saw something in Ryou; he opened up to me, but as soon as Sumi walked in, he shut down. If they can't communicate with each other, as much in love as I think they must be, then something has to give. Either the wall between them will come down, or…

Even two people who are in love, who are very close, can find the distance between them hard to shrink. And there's no avoiding that cold truth.

When I get to my room, I put the paperback in my drawer and don't look at it for the rest of the evening.

#

I don't sleep well that night; Sumi makes it known through Mitsuru that we should get takeout again, to avoid a stressful situation. Breakfast the next morning is similarly divided, so it's just Mitsuru and me hanging out in our room. I feel like a zombie going through the motions as I prepare the rice. I just hope I don't burn something or set a stray rag on fire or anything else.

"Have I ever told you about Rick Ankiel?" asks Mitsuru.

No, Mitsuru, I have no idea who he is, but I'm betting he's a baseball player.

"He was a pitcher," Mitsuru goes on, wiping a bit of egg from his lip. "A pretty good pitcher, actually. The Cardinals took him to the playoffs and had him start their first game. At first, he was okay, but in the third inning, he walked four guys and threw five wild pitches."

"Wild pitches?" I ask.

"The ball goes past the catcher—you know, the guy who's supposed to catch it behind home plate—in a way he couldn't possibly have caught it. It's not that unusual to have one happen in a game, but more than one is pretty weird. Five in the same inning? Unheard of. It's like he suddenly lost the ability to throw the ball where he wanted, not even in the same, well, ballpark."

How depressing. You didn't even emphasize his meteoric rise to greatness, Mitsuru.

"He kept trying to pitch, but he couldn't really do it anymore. Even after his elbow was rebuilt, he could almost throw well, but not well enough, not for pitching, so he decided to stop."

"Then what did he do?" I ask, humoring him.

"He went back to the minor leagues and converted himself to an outfielder. He may not have been able to throw straight to home, but he could throw it far, hard, and accurate over long distances. The man has a cannon for an arm, and he runs well. He changed himself; he found something he could do even when everything fell apart."

"And he's still around?" I ask.

"Yeah. He plays for Washington now."

How about that. "Did it take you long to make sure he didn't suddenly leave baseball or something?"

He laughs. "Maybe forty-five minutes. I tend not to remember these things until the spur of the moment."

I reach across the table and pat the kid on the head; he tries to swat my arm away, but only weakly. He's a good kid, and he means well. I can definitely appreciate that. Between what happened with Rin and now Sumi, I really needed the cheering up.

But I don't have much time to linger. I have to hurry in to Professor Tanaka's lab; the world waits for no man, and the world of science is even more impatient. Over the past few weeks, I've learned a bit more about Professor Tanaka's goal. Right now, we use these wafers as a substrate to grow various films on, and what we want to do is find the best process for growing these films. That means there are several simple factors involved: which face of the wafer do we use, do we etch the wafer with hydrogen before depositing the film, how hot do we get the RF furnace to deposit the film, and so on.

So far, I've seen a little bit of everything. I've done some hydrogen etching. I've examined wafers under AFM. Today, I'm using another instrument called LEED—low-energy electron diffraction. It's basically a big vacuum chamber, about the size of a…of a…

A low-energy electron diffraction instrument?

It's hard to describe, but it's steel-walled, riveted, and has a couple windows to the inside to see where the sample is, as well as a screen that the electrons light up and that we use to create an image. The glowing green patterns of light and dark tell us something about the ordering of the wafer's surface.

At least, in theory. To me, they're just pretty pictures. I'm not far enough yet to make sense of them. I don't know when that will happen.

That's really what this research has been like. I do one thing; then I do another. I move from one aspect of the work to the next as needed, and it's good to be needed. Don't get me wrong. I tell myself this is problem-solving, in a way. This is science. What I'm doing here is learning what to look for in these wafers and what we'd like to avoid, so we can make the best films possible. Only then can we get to applications—quantum electronics, waveguides, and so on.

Still, there's a lot of necessary work that has to be done. Professor Tanaka drops by with a huge mug of coffee in hand and slides a wafer case across the lab table. "Run it through Auger first; let's just get a look at the profile before we run LEED."

Auger is another kind of analysis we do; it's all the same really. We just examine the surface with all the ways we have available. That means putting on gloves, putting on goggles, opening up the instrument, inserting the wafer…

And waiting. In this case, waiting for the first pump to get the pressure differential down, so that we can open the main chamber without making something explode. The roughing pump is a loud and obnoxious device. You can hardly hear yourself think while it's going, and I guess that's a blessing. As it is, I can't help but wonder what Rin's doing. Is she painting in her studio, disappointed that I couldn't understand her? I don't know what she wants from me right now. I've never asked. Friends probably shouldn't need to, but I wonder all the same. Was I wrong to tell her she wasn't alone? I thought it was the truth, at least in that one narrow instance. She's the one who took it too far. But that's in her nature too, I guess. Rin was never one for much restraint, either.

And if that were the only problem in my life, I think I could handle it, but now with Sumi and her husband at odds, I can't even go home to find a break. Ryou was right. I got involved because Sumi asked me to. Maybe it was still a good thing to do, a good thing to try, but that didn't mean I was in a position to fix anything.

Even if someone had given the same speech to me while I was in the hospital, I don't know if I'd have listened, either.

I sigh. There's nothing I can really do about all that now. I've got an instrument in front of me, with a monitor and an array of gauges to tell me what's going on inside. The pressure in the insertion chamber is good, so I go to the valve and let the wafer into the main chamber. The tweezer arm in the shaft is a bit tricky to operate, but I get the wafer into position without a problem. It's nothing I haven't done at least a dozen times before. There's a lot I've had to do with this apparatus. I've cut out insulation and built thermal blankets to keep the interior walled off from the outside. Eventually they want to use it as an oven and do analysis of the film growth on the fly. I can't say cutting out holes in rubber and filling sheets with fiberglass insulation was what I imagined when I got into school, though.

That's just what you have to do sometimes. Not all the work is glamorous or exciting.

I look at the gauges once more, but the tick marks by the pressure needles merge together in a blur. I blink a couple times, yet the stinging sensation doesn't abate. Let's get this over with. I'm tired, and I'm just sitting here, too exhausted mentally to think, too weary to do work while I wait.

I go to the high-speed pump and switch it on. There's a reason the high-speed wasn't on in the first place. It doesn't work that well at high pressures. That's what the roughing pump is for. Once you get the pressure low enough, the light and delicate blades of the high-speed can do their work without risk of inefficiency or—

SCREECH!

Or damage.

The sudden sound jerks me wide awake, and my eyes are able to focus. I check the pressure gauges again, my heart sinking in my chest. They confirm my fears. The pressure inside the chamber is at least fifty times higher than what it should be to be using the high-speed at all.

"The hell was that?" asks Professor Tanaka, poking his head into the lab. "Sounded like the death wail of my great aunt from Nagoya."

He catches me frantically trying to switch off the smoking high-speed pump. It's must be pretty obvious what happened.

"Ah, you fried it, didn't you?" he remarks, grimacing. "Well damn. It'll probably take us a week to get another one. Got sleepy, right? Don't worry. I did that a few times when I was in grad school. That's what this line of work is a lot of the time, Nakai. Things take time. They always have. When I was in school, I'd be spending the same amount of time as you for an image that was maybe a tenth as good, if that. Technology progresses, but the time we're willing to spend waiting stays about the same. Funny how that works."

Overall, he doesn't even seem fazed by this development, and paradoxically, that makes me feel worse. How much did that pump cost? A lot, I bet. Enough to buy tickets to a dozen games at the Tokyo Dome, no doubt. Yeah, accidents happen, but this one happened not because I didn't know what could result. It happened because I was careless. I wasn't paying attention, and yeah, the early time of day had something to do with it, but not everything.

"Nothing really to be done right now," says Tanaka. "Come back in a few days; we'll see what we can figure out."

I wander out in a daze. I don't really know what I'm supposed to do or where I should go. I don't have plans. Sumi isn't in yet, I'm sure. I could go to my office, but most of the time, no one's there, and hanging out by Sumi's desk would be weird without her around. I could go home, but that would just put me squarely back into that situation with Sumi and her husband, the situation I want to avoid.

And seeing Rin is right out. Our last conversation was frustrating, and that was when I didn't have problems of my own to worry about.

There's nowhere for me to go, so I do the next best thing: I hop on a city bus and ride. I don't care where it takes me. I'm just going somewhere, for the sake of going somewhere. I'm pretty good at this, at aimless wanderings. The girl in the front row with her headphones so loud everyone can hear her music has somewhere she wants to go. Maybe the smelly old man in the back has a place in mind, too. We're all equal travelers on this bus, and as the city rolls by around us, I have all the time in the world to think and reflect.

I've fallen in love with a girl again, only to find the wall between us just as insurmountable as before.

I promised a friend I would try to help her, but I just made things blow up instead.

And I'm doing research that doesn't keep me engaged or interested in at all, that I screw up because I'm not paying attention to it.

So what am I doing here?

I'm letting the city rush by. There are dozens of people walking the streets, oblivious to my distress. They all have their own lives and problems, and they're coping just fine.

Me, I need to sleep. I'm tired, and my head is swimming. I need to get some rest.

#

In retrospect, it's not really a good idea to fall asleep on a public bus. I'm lucky I didn't have some of my stuff taken, but I emerge from my slumber more or less intact.

Bzzz!

And with something incessantly vibrating in my pocket.

I take a look around. The other passengers don't seem to pay me any mind, and I don't recognize the buildings outside the bus windows. I wonder how long I've been out. I could've racked up a pretty hefty transit charge by now.

Bzzz!

But the phone comes first. I wipe dust from my eyes and answer with a groan. "Hello?"

"I know that sound," says the man on the other end. "It's the same sound you made when you woke up in my class."

It's Mutou. Damn, I haven't spoken to him in at least a year? A year and a half? He sends me emails with interesting articles every now and then, but this is the first time I've heard his voice in a long time. "How did you get this number?" I ask.

"A friend of yours called the school. I think Aoki was her name. She was fairly persistent, urging me to get in touch with you. Seems you weren't taking her calls, so she thought you might take mine instead."

Sumi? She must've gone looking for me when I didn't show up for class. Well, that's a relief. There's someone looking out for me after all. She must've called while I was asleep.

"I wasn't avoiding Sumi," I explain. "I just nodded off."

"Ah, so I can go back to my lunch? That's good. If I don't finish, my mind will be on lunch instead, and I fear I'd give my next lecture on the physics of why some rice sticks together while other kinds don't."

I sigh. "Well, it can't hurt to get some advice. I screwed up today. I turned on a low-pressure fan too early and left it a smoking heap."

"You blew something up? That's nothing to be sad about. You should be proud, Nakai. You're a real scientist now."

I chuckle sardonically. "It doesn't make me feel like a scientist."

"Why not? Science isn't science without the possibility of failure, of mistakes. We're human beings, you know. We make mistakes and errors. The purpose of science is to examine phenomena and theory rigorously, more than enough times to verify that we haven't made any mistakes. We know they do happen."

I shake my head. "I'm not enjoying the mistakes I'm making right now. They're hurting people."

"Ah, that bad, huh? Well, it's an occupational hazard."

"Of being a physicist?"

"Of being a person, Nakai. You think you can get through life without causing a few scrapes now and then? We're not so lucky or perfect. In the end, regardless of the consequences, you should treat a mistake like any other. If you test a hypothesis and it turns out wrong, what can you do?"

"Come up with a new hypothesis and test it."

"Dead on. You are a scientist after all. You solve problems. That is what you do. That's what I've seen since the first day you walked into my class. Now, that's not to say it will always come naturally. Some problems are so big and intertwined that it's impossible to see the solution right away. If I asked you what would happen if I tied two balls together with a spring and threw it into the air, how would you attack that problem?"

"I'd look at the energy of the spring, the energy of the center of mass with respect to the earth, the kinetic energies of the two balls with respect to—"

"You'd break it down," says Mutou, interrupting. "One problem at a time. Manageable pieces. That's what scientists do. We take complex problems and reduce them to building blocks that, individually, we understand. Even the most formidable system in the world can be reduced in its complexity one layer at a time, until what is left is merely tedious to work through, rather than unfathomable. We make things boring, Nakai, one step at a time."

I don't think I'd ever advertise that scientists make the interesting boring, but the statement seems entirely like Mutou. It's actually a bit comforting.

"What if there's a problem that you can't break down?" I ask him. "Something that resists all attempts to be understood, no matter how much you try?"

"There is no such thing; there are only things we can't understand _quickly_," he says. "The process may take months or years or more. There is still a lot we don't know about—regarding the origin of the universe and its future—but every day, people are working to unravel those mysteries, to make concrete what was previously just conjecture and speculation. It may be there _is_ such a thing as an incomprehensible phenomenon, but I don't believe that. I think if such a thing existed, it would defeat the point of all science. There would be no reason to be a scientist anymore. There would be no reason to investigate the world. I can't ascribe to such a view of the world. I will always encourage young men and women to investigate the world around them, to make sense of that which resists explanation. That, to me, is the essence of what science is. I think the question, then, that you face is this: are you a scientist, Nakai? Or aren't you?"

Is he really asking me this question? I spent four years getting my bachelor's degree!

"It's a serious question," he says. "One only you can answer. I think you are, but in the end, it's your choice. Once that choice is made, your path is clear. Either you attack the problems in front of you, breaking them down one at a time, or you let them be. Will you be satisfied leaving things as they are?"

A distant voice comes on the other end, and Mutou is muffled on the other end, saying something.

"I'm sorry, Nakai, class is starting soon. I'll have to go."

"I understand. Thanks for the advice, Teacher."

"Anytime. I wish you the best. A man's path, his direction in life, is the most important decision he'll ever make. You're an earnest man, Nakai. I know you'll make the right choice for yourself."

There's a series of beeps on the line; Mutou is gone, and I take a deep breath, trying to let his words sink in.

It would be easy to write Rin off as completely incomprehensible, to say that there is no good relationship we could have without total understanding.

It would be easy to say that Ryou's situation is too different from what mine was, and I could never hope to reach him and help Sumi.

It would be easy to keep going with the career path I'm on, saying that my disinterest is natural, inevitable.

Those are all easy things to do, and because of that, I refuse to consider them. I did not become a scientist, a physicist, just to solve easy problems. One step at a time, I will make the difficult tractable. That is the direction I choose for myself.

When the bus pulls up to the next stop, I swipe my card at the front and step off. I don't know where I am or how I'll get back to Toudai, but it's a street like any other, in the city I now call home. Thanks to Mutou, I know how to attack this problem. I look for the nearest street sign or address, and I go from there, trusting that I'll find my way.


	4. Deluge

**Deluge**

_Chapter Four_

Thanks to a map from a friendly bus driver, it's not hard for me to make my way back to toward Toudai, but I'm not ready to go home, not just yet. Mutou urged me to tackle one problem at a time and break it down, and I'm doing that.

My first stop is Rin's school. In a lot of ways, she's the most difficult to unravel, so I want to tackle the mystery of her inner self first. I admit I still don't understand what she said yesterday, about her paintings of us not meaning anything to her, but I know she's not trying to confuse me on purpose. I don't think she's capable of such a thing. She has so much difficulty being understood that trying _not_ to be would be anathema to her. I feel pretty good about my choice to step back before I got too angry or frustrated over it, too. Getting angry with Rin serves no purpose. You can't accuse her of not trying. She wants that wall between her and the world to go down as much as anyone. If you think you're frustrated talking to her, just look at it from her eyes, when she sees people getting antsy and angry and she _can't_ understand it, or can't figure out how to fix it.

It's useless to let those frustrations get the better of you. That doesn't mean it's any easier to keep them in check, but it's the only thing to do. If I'm able to keep cool that way, I think we can make progress. I have to believe that, or all of this is pointless.

I feel at peace with myself, at least, thinking that way. Whether it will stick when Rin comes by is an open question. I get to her studio door, finding it locked, and Professor Adachi is nowhere to be found either. I sit down in the hall to camp out, waiting for Rin. I don't hear anything going on inside, I take that to mean she's out. Or maybe Adachi had her hospitalized, but I hope that's not so.

I take the opportunity to doodle, and today I draw her. My sense of proportion has improved over time, but only slightly. Time has softened some of Rin's harder edges. Her hair is better kept. She keeps focus on objects and people for longer periods of time. She eats better, her recent period of seclusion aside; her cheekbones aren't quite as bony or noticeable. Still, though all these factors put together make her more attractive and easier to relate to, do they speak of her actually finding something comfortable for herself? Or has she just found ways to better emulate normal people, as she did with her smiles and laughter back in high school?

I won't pretend to know either way. I just draw her with her usual blank, inscrutable expression. She does have more range than that, but nothing else seems so much like her.

"Hisao?"

It is, however, not the expression I see when she happens upon me in the hallway, once again lugging a bag of paint cans around her neck and shoulder. Her eyes are a little wider, and there's a hint of surprise in her voice, but soon enough, her gaze wanders again. That seems a little too fast. Maybe it's deliberate?

"Hey," I say, closing my notebook. "I wanted to talk some more. Is that okay?"

"But you're already talking," she says. "Shouldn't you ask before you say anything?"

"How would I do that?"

She presses her lips together, contemplating. "That's a good question. I'll have to think about that."

As I get up, she works the foot-controlled lock of the studio door. She shoves the door open with her toes, and I follow her inside. She slumps over, letting the bag of paint cans fall to the floor. Without further ado, she takes her seat, slips off her sandals, and takes up a paintbrush to slave over her canvas. Gone are the myriad works that littered the floor just yesterday. It's like the studio has been wiped clean of their existence. There are just a few works left, and what Rin works on now is new to me.

It's a bookshelf. A dusty, but otherwise relatively well-kept bookshelf. Rin's technique is so precise that I can read the titles on some of the books' dust jackets. _War and Peace_ sits alongside _Tale of Genji_, along with modern comics in trade paperback—_Naruto_, _Shaman King_, and more. The variety is impressive, but what does it mean?

"It seems to me like a comment on the great breadth of literature," I say. "It's all different but all art of some form nonetheless."

"Bad luck," she intones, "but that works."

"Is that how you feel?" I ask. "That you're just one piece of a larger collection of modern artists?"

"It's an idea," she says, her gaze never wavering from the canvas. "I'm not even that fond of the idea, but it's easy to squeeze, to finger, to—"

"Grasp," I finish.

"Yes. People want easy things to understand. Hard things make people walk away and look at something else."

Sadly, she's probably right about that, as long as we're talking about art. I'm not sure we are anymore, though. "You think people won't pay attention to you because you're too complicated? That's what your paintings are for, aren't they? To give a window into yourself?"

She shakes her head. "Not anymore."

"But yesterday—"

"Yesterday is gone," she says. "You can't go back to days in the past. You can only relive them in your memories, but memory is imperfect. People forget things. I forget things. It's like each time you relive the memory, you make a new copy of it, a new experience of going through it. And when you come back again, you make another copy. And then another, and then another. What happens if you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a—"

"Rin," I interrupt.

"Sorry. But do you know what happens when you do that?"

I'm not sure where this is going, but it seems like she's trying to make a point. "It degrades," I say. "Errors creep in. Even DNA makes mistakes copying itself sometimes."

She nods solemnly. "I once thought it would be better not to remember things, so they'd stay perfect in my head, but I'm not that good at remembering things anyway." She frowns, and her foot twitches just a hair's breadth from touching the paintbrush to the canvas. "But I'm also bad at forgetting things I want to forget, as much as I try to make copies of them, so that I don't know which is the original and which is fake."

Instinctively, I follow her gaze to a corner of the studio. There's one painting propped up against the wall, another in the series that captures Rin and me on that stormy day four years ago. This one shows no corruption, though. It is true to life and real. It's the final embrace we shared, the last touch and connection between us, before Rin severed it utterly.

"I tried really hard," she says, "but I couldn't forget which one was real. I tried so many errors and fabrications—things I wanted, things I didn't want. None of it worked."

That's why they don't mean anything. Individually, no single painting in that series has any significance. They were all attempts—desperate, longing attempts—to put that memory behind her. The memory of that day wounded her so deeply that she did everything in her artistic power to blot it from her mind.

I try to form the next sentence as coolly as I can. "You wanted to forget me that much?"

That gets her attention. She turns her head to look at me from the corner of her eye. "Do you know how to ride a bike, Hisao? I don't, but I've watched people do it. I've thought maybe I could ride a unicycle if I practiced enough, but everybody seems to pay close attention to unicycle riders. I think me watching those people watching me would be very distracting."

I wince. Despair at our lack of mutual understanding tugs at my heart. Rin picks up on it and shakes her head, trying to will herself to make sense.

"Right, I was walking somewhere with that. Where was I walking…? Oh. If you fall off a bike and break a bone, would you want to remember it? Or would you only want to remember that losing your balance is bad, even if you didn't understand why?"

So it is. My inability to understand her back then—or even to just give her hope she could be understood—broke something inside her.

Rin puts down her paintbrush and watches me with both eyes. "You want to forget, too."

"No!" I cry, shaking my head. "It hurts, but I don't want to forget. I think if I did, I wouldn't be capable of learning anything from it."

She picks up the paintbrush again, cool and indifferent. "I've already learned everything I need to learn." She sets her gaze on the bookcase painting and dabs the brush in a bowl. "It was nice of you to say you could understand me, but I think you overestimated yourself. And me, too. Sometimes I say things that make sense, but I have to try really hard. Even then, they don't always come out right. Painting is no different. People don't understand me any better. I have to say things that are simple enough to understand and let the rest stay inside me. It doesn't have anywhere to go, after all." She gestures to the painting with her brush. "This is the only way I can hug people, Hisao—with arms that aren't mine, with ideas that come from me but don't really get at who I am."

"But that's not true at all!" I say. "I've seen your new paintings. The orange and the fruit bowl—you love oranges. You can't tell me that that decayed orange doesn't represent something about you, doesn't mean something about how you feel!"

"It shouldn't," she says. "If it does, then it's me leaking onto the canvas. I shouldn't do that. I don't want to do that. Whenever I do, people only see the paint. They don't see me. I leak out, and what leaks is wasted. People don't like leaking things. That's why they check the faucet if it drips in the sink. I like that sound, but most people don't. Some things are just better shut off."

I've seen Rin at her most desperate. I've seen her cold and half-naked, trying in vain to feel anything at all, but the vision before me now is worse, in a way. It's twisted. Anyone else would say nothing is wrong with this picture. The lights in the studio are pure and white. Rin paints without a moment's hesitation, and the image on the canvas is perfectly ordinary, but it's all a façade. It's fake. It's the fiction she forces on herself. It's enough that other people won't interfere with her longing, her despair.

"Why…?" No, that's the wrong question. "How can you find the strength to keep going, if you think trying to express yourself is so futile?"

"It's easy to keep going, easier than going away." Her voice is flat, and she looks at both her stubby arms in contemplation. "It's easier because unlike other people, I don't have any wrists to slit, Hisao."

I snap. Those words are nothing short of chilling, and I can't stand here and listen to them. I take the paintbrush from Rin's foot and throw it aside. I lift her from her chair by her chest and torso—she's still very light—and make her stand in front of me, so I can look into her eyes.

"Don't say things like that!" I cry.

Her eyes are wide with confusion. "I think about things a lot. I don't do most of them."

"But just hearing that is frightening. It scares me. I don't want you to go away again."

Her expression darkens. "You should've forgotten about me, Hisao."

"Well, I couldn't," I admit. "I couldn't. I care too much about you. Even knowing there will be parts of you I may never understand, I want to keep trying. The parts I do understand make me admire your imagination. They make me want to be there for you so you won't feel alone. They make me look at the world with a new set of eyes, searching for patterns I'd ignored or truths I'd taken for granted. You are unique, and you are wonderful, and if you can be patient with my bumbling, my efforts to understand, then I will be here as your friend, to give whatever support I can."

"You won't be happy," she warns. "I think strange things all the time, and they come out jumbled and muddled and—" Her brow creases in frustration. "The word for eggs. What is that word?"

"Scrambled," I finish.

"Yes. You think I'm a butterfly, Hisao, but maybe I'm just a moth. Did you know there's really no difference between butterflies and moths?"

I'm forced to laugh. This is just so far out there I don't even know what to do anymore. "No, I didn't."

"They're really the same. There's no organized way to tell them apart based on the stuff that makes up their cells. But to all of us, butterflies are colorful and beautiful, and moths are plain. Moths follow lights in the darkness, even if it takes them to a bug zapper. Maybe you are the moth, Hisao, and you think I'm the light, but I'm just the zapper. But I'm bug zapper that doesn't want to zap. Isn't that a paradox?"

"I can't promise I'll ever understand you fully," I say, "but I'll keep trying, as hard as I can, to see the light for what it is."

Rin's gaze leaves me, wandering to my hands, which are still grasping her shoulders tightly, as if not to let her go and fall into the abyss. I blush when she notices, and I release her, but her expression becomes curious—even yearning?

"Are you my friend, Hisao?" she asks.

Now isn't the time for hesitation. "Yes, absolutely."

"Would you do me a favor?"

She doesn't—she can't mean _that_ favor again, can she?

"Not that," she corrects herself. "Kiss me."

Oh, Rin, no. I mean, I could, but—I don't know. I know that's not your intent, but I can't turn my feelings on and off like a lightbulb based on your needs. I have limits. I don't know if I can do this and stay the same as I was before.

"Please," she begs me. "I need to know you can feel some of what I feel—if there really is a person like that at all."

So this is the choice she's made. If someone can understand her, or at least a fraction of her, then maybe she'll regain the hope to put herself into her paintings again. If not…

If not, she'll stay the way she is now—despondent and cold, insulating herself in a fiction of normalcy.

I don't know if I'll be the same after this, or if we'll be the same, but I can't deny her this chance, this decision, to go back and choose once again what kind of person she is to be.

I touch her gently on the shoulder, nodding my acceptance, and she closes her eyes. She doesn't pucker her lips or anything cute like that. To tell the truth, they look a little dry, but that doesn't deter me. They still have this unusual heart shape to them, as if they were a window to her soul.

I press my lips to hers, and right away, I feel that she's cold. Not ice cold, but still, markedly colder than I am. It's like she was all alone in the frozen wilderness, wandering for years, and I'm her first respite, her first chance to come in from the isolation.

She starts kissing me back, her tongue poking and prodding at my lips, and I let her inside. I embrace her with one arm and touch my free hand to her cheek, her ear, her hair. Our breaths rush, becoming hurried and chaotic. She doesn't make a peep, though; she just lets me pull her in closer to feel the warmth in her body.

But only for a short while. By the time she ends the kiss, the smell of paint fills my nostrils—it's something I can't take in without thinking of her. She steps back, and the distance between us is resumed.

"Interesting." She sits back down in front of her painting, her gaze distant and far away. "Very interesting."

I have no idea if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"Hisao, can you take this painting away?" she asks. "And give me a new canvas."

"You're starting something new?"

She nods. "There's something inside of me, and I want to see what comes out."

That's Rin-speak for wanting to work out her feelings. She sounds hopeful, though, and she's willing to wipe away her pessimistic, inert work from before. I smile a little bit as I lug the old canvas away and replace it with a blank slate.

"Thanks," she says. "Can you give me a little time?"

"Sure. Good luck, Rin."

She nods a bit and dabs her paintbrush in a bowl of water, clearing out the pigment to begin anew. I won't pretend to understand all that just happened between us, but the blank canvas gives me hope. I think something inspiring will come out this time, but the only way to know is to wait and see.

#

I feel a little beat when I finally get back home. It's getting close to noon, so hopefully I can scrounge something up to eat before heading in to class. Actually, I might just skip classes today. It's been an exhausting morning, and I could stand the time to recharge.

I put my key in the lock, but as soon as the mechanism turns, the door behind me flings open. "Hisao?"

It's Sumi. She looks a bit frayed and haggard, but there's a hint of relief in her eyes, too. She must've been worried.

"Hey," I say. "Thanks for tracking down Mutou for me. He really helped me figure some things out."

"I'm just glad you're okay. I've been keeping a lookout for you ever since your teacher called back saying he reached you."

I wince. "I should've called. I just wanted to get some things figured out. I dropped by Rin's school to talk to her. She's wasn't doing so well, but I think I left her better than when I stopped by, so I think that's good. It's hard to tell with her, but I'm hopeful."

"You're really into her, huh?"

"She's special to me, yeah." I crack a smile. "So are you."

She scoffs. "What a charmer you are. Do you always make a point to hit on married women?"

We share a laugh at that, but it's just a momentary respite. I glance past her, into her apartment. There's no sign of Ryou, but I know he must be in there somewhere. "How is he?" I ask quietly.

Her expression sours. "Still sleeping. He sleeps a lot, sometimes, especially when he's not in a good mood." She balls her hand into a fist, trying to contain her frustration. "He's so stubborn, Hisao! He won't admit anything's wrong."

"He did to me," I say.

"Really?"

"He seems like a proud guy. You'd say that, too, right? And I've seen how, if you two do anything affectionate around Mitsuru and me, he gets pretty anxious about it."

Sumi nods. "He likes to hold all that in."

"Especially with you. I may not have been in a long-term relationship like you, but I know when you're in love it can screw with your head. He may not be willing to admit it to you, but you know it, and I know it. You might have to be the one to give him a way out."

"What way out?"

"Let him rejoin SDF."

She glances back, into the room, but there's no reaction from inside. Still, the suggestion doesn't seem to surprise her. She inches the door shut, and we talk in the hallway. I hope no one's around to hear.

"You really think that's the only way?" she asks. "I mean, I really hoped he would find something he'd be happy with around here. More likely than not, they'd transfer him to a unit too far away to live with us. If he were going overseas, that'd be one thing. I think I could handle that better, but when he went into SDF the first time, we promised each other we'd stay together as long as we could. It's not a completely safe line of work. Peacekeepers go overseas all the time, but at least at home, we'd spend as much time as we could together." She meets my gaze, and the look in her eyes is lost, worried, and pleading. "I'm afraid, Hisao. I'm afraid he and I might grow apart being separated. I've never loved anyone else. How did you do it? How did you recover when your friend Tezuka left you?"

"Take it easy for a second," I try to assure her. "Just because you'll be apart doesn't mean you'll love each other less. Ask him, Sumi. Communicate with him. Yeah, it'll be difficult if he wants to be prideful, but there's no substitute for sharing feelings, thoughts, and ideas. If I've learned nothing else, I've learned that much. You already told me you felt guilty about asking him to make a sacrifice. You already know what you have to do to fix this. You just have to do it, and you can. I know you're capable of it."

Sumi purses her lips, nodding. "You're right. I knew it for a while. I was just frustrated. We agreed to do this, that he would leave SDF, and then he never followed through with it. It felt like he was moping around, not even trying, and he wouldn't come out and say it what he wanted."

"Sometimes, the people you love most are the ones it's hardest to say things to," I observe. "Even if he can't put it to words, you can take comfort that you do know what he's saying."

She nods again, and she turns the knob to the door, but when the lock clicks, she hesitates. Without looking at me, she mumbles, "It's a scary thing—looking at the path you thought your life would take and throwing most of it aside."

Yes, yes it is.

With my silence, Sumi goes back into her apartment. Her steps are quick and determined. She leaves the door ajar, and I stand there, listening. I think for a moment there's more I could've said. I could've told her I never did recover from Rin's departure; I healed from it, but it still leaves a scar on me, just as the surgeon's incision near my heart did, too. You won't see it ordinarily, but it's always there. Still, that scar was better than letting my heart fail, and I feel confident that even if the worst thing happened, Sumi would find the strength to go on. She was always determined that way.

I liked her once. I don't mind admitting it. When I met her in Kyoto, I found her to be lively and unabashed in her passion for science, for technology, for puns made from formulas and other geeky pursuits. But she was already engaged to Ryou at the time, and I wondered now and then whether I was drawn to her precisely because she was taken, because then I was justified in keeping some distance, in not acting on what I felt.

I may not have had the right reasons for being interested in her, but the friendship we've fostered is real, and I genuinely hope the advice I've given her now proves helpful. I couldn't bear to see her face twisted again hardship and strife.

There's a distant knocking, and I hear heavy footsteps. A lock clicks, and a door opens.

"Morning," she says. "Put on your old uniform. We're taking you down to a recruiter."

"What?" says Ryou, his speech slurred with fatigue. "You wanna do what?"

"You're going back to SDF. You have a problem with that, Corporal?"

"What? I mean, uh, no, ma'am?"

"You're going to enjoy doing it? You're not going to fuck around and sleep and play video games all day?"

"Absolutely not!"

"Then that's the Ryou I need." She kisses him briefly. "Even if he has to be away from me for a while to be himself again."

There's a moment of silence between them, and I peer in just enough to catch a glimpse of the two of them in the door's opening. Ryou looks stunned, still processing what Sumi's said, but after a minute, an elated grin comes over him, and he embraces Sumi, picking her up off the ground.

The high-school sweethearts are together again, their heartbeats in rhythm. All is right with the world.

#

My good feeling about Sumi and Ryou is vindicated at breakfast the next morning. The two of them come over to eat with Mitsuru and me, and Ryou is literally a different man. He looks sharp and proud in his uniform, and he jokes around with Mitsuru freely. "Kid, you need to get some of that hair trimmed," he says, tussling the brown strands.

"I like my hair!" cries Mitsuru.

"Then maybe only if you slack off," says Ryou. "If you start dropping off with your grades, Sumi will call me, and I'll get the razor, right, Sumi?"

"I've always said Mitchan could use more discipline in his life," she agrees.

"No way, not a chance. If that happens, Hisao will protect me, right?"

"I don't think you want the guy with a heart condition to be protecting you from a guy trained by SDF. That's not going over well for me, nor for you."

Mitsuru fumes at that, and the rest of us share a good laugh at his expense. For the rest of the morning, the four of us are in good spirits, and I'm grateful for that. This is a breakfast I want to remember for some time, and fondly at that.

"The recruiter called back early this morning," Sumi explains. "They're not sure where Ryou will be placed, but he may be reporting for duty before the end of the week." She touches arm longingly, already feeling the prospective distance between them. "Isn't that great?"

Ryou nods tentatively, still keenly aware of our presence. To break the tension, I meekly raise a glass of milk to start a toast, never mind that milk isn't something I'd ever raise a toast with. "Then this is to a safe journey and good memories and something happy to come home to, or something like all of that stuff. Yeah? Good luck to Ryou. That's what I'm trying to say."

We raise our glasses, and there's a satisfying clunk when they touch. He downs a full cup of juice in one gulp and nods in appreciation to all of us. "Thanks. It means a lot to me. I just want to make sure that things are taken care of while I'm gone. Mitsuru, that means I'm counting on you to look after your sister, yeah?"

"Kid can't even look after pet crabs," said Sumi.

Ryou chuckled. "Well, if that's true, then it's a good thing we have Nakai around, too. He can look after both of you. Seems like he's got a pretty level head on his shoulders, so that should do fine."

"I dunno," I say, "between Sumi always getting herself into homework problems that require at least two people to make sense of and Mitsuru spouting off baseball history at the slightest provocation, it might be difficult."

"They're _your_ homework problems, too!" cries Sumi.

"And don't exaggerate and say it's all the time," says Mitsuru. "Saying things like that is like the punishment handed down for the Pine Tar Game. Totally disproportionate, man."

The rest of breakfast goes smoothly, and it's good that it does, for Sumi and I have to go to class.

"I'll get the dishes," says Mitsuru. "You guys get moving."

Sumi and I are just about out the door when—

"Nakai."

Ryou's voice is sharp and short. It stops me in my tracks. He looks at me with a stern, serious gaze.

"I meant what I said," he explains, offering a hand, "about looking after Sumi and Mitsuru. Someone has to. At the least, someone has to make sure Sumi doesn't try to take on all responsibilities for the three of you. I'm not going to be here, so that largely falls to you."

I take his offered hand and give the firmest squeeze I can—which isn't very firm against his monstrous hands and strong shake. For a moment, I fear whether I'll ever get my hand back, but he grins and releases me, slapping me on the back for good measure.

"You guys get going," he says.

And go we do, toward the future, with Sumi looking pensive and lost in thought as we walk to the elevator.

"You know, Hisao," she says, "I have to admit I didn't have completely innocent motives, inviting you to live with Mitsuru and the rest of us."

"That's okay," I say. "I didn't think you were completely innocent."

She punches me in the arm. "You're too clever. In all seriousness, though, with Ryou being down about things, I was feeling a bit lonely. I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I thought if you were around, at least I'd have someone to talk to if things got worse. And they did get worse for a while, but because you were here, I had the strength to do what needed doing, and it's all turning out all right."

As the elevator doors open, she takes me in her arms, holding the hug for a long second.

"Thanks for being here," she says, "and for being yourself."

"I'm just glad to have been a part of the solution, really."

She pulls away and jabs at my arm again, this time with more of a glancing blow. "Even in matters of the heart, you're a big smartypants. I hardly get to help you with our homework. You're just making me feel useless, you know? It's irritating."

We step inside the elevator—shiny metal box with white, speckled tiling. A computerized chime plays each time we pass a floor. Sumi's irritation isn't real, of course, except to say she feels bad for relying on me without giving anything in return. Actually, there's one way I can fix that.

"Sumi," I ask, "you know about the pump I blew up yesterday?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, that got me thinking maybe I should look for a new line of research."

"Really? Because of one blown pump?"

"It's more than that," I explain. "I don't feel engaged with the work. There's a lot of manual labor involved—and you know I'm not really cut out for that. I don't see the problems I'm supposed to be solving in front of me. They're all far off, you know? But I'm not really sure if it's all the same everywhere or I should look at different opportunities or what."

Sumi smiles knowingly. "You need to talk to some people, Hisao. I know exactly who, as well."

#

After our first class, Sumi drags me to her office and sits me down at the desk beside hers. There is a proper occupant to this desk, a Chinese guy I've spoken to once or twice, but he doesn't respond when spoken to, so I don't know his name. He keeps his things entirely in the overhead drawer, so I end up using the more of the desk than he does.

"Hey, guys," says Sumi, getting our neighbors' attention. "Hisao here has no idea what the fuck he's doing with his research or if he wants to keep doing what he's doing. I thought you guys might be able to help him get his head on straight."

From his corner desk, Jirou straightens his glasses and grins. "You don't pull any punches, do you, Aoki?"

She shakes her head with a grin. "I don't have time to put up with shit, and neither does Hisao. You said you used to work with computers, right?"

"I did, yes. Oh, it was awful. Since I was a kid I had a passion for working with new technology and software. And I went through undergrad thinking that way. I went into industry thinking that way, and it was good…for a while. I developed some really nifty tools, stuff I'm proud of to this day, but I just couldn't get away from having to explain what I'd done and how my programs worked to some really, really stupid people. I mean, I know that's a terrible thing to say and a bad attitude to have, but just working on support was mind-numbing."

"Was it really that bad?" asked Sumi. "I mean, we're all smart people here. Part of being out in the world is realizing that not everyone's like that, so getting frustrated with people because they don't understand you is just unproductive."

That's more true that you know, Sumi.

"You're probably right," said Jirou, "but let me tell you a story. One of the customers I worked with had a problem where, after running my program and waiting for a minute, the screen would flicker off and he'd be unable to access the computer until he rebooted it."

"What was the problem?" I ask.

"He didn't realize that he'd set the computer to turn off the monitor after a minute and thought that it was 'suspicious' he'd be asked for his password again on unlocking it, so he would just reboot. I kid you not; this is what an actual real-life person did—and he was an accountant, no less! Someone good with numbers! Oh, it was awful, and that's when I realized I wanted out."

"So you started looking at physics?" asks Sumi.

"I did. Physics was my other great passion as a child, and it offered the chance to still work on software sometimes but also to deal with people who wouldn't be totally clueless if I wrote something for their use. That didn't mean it would be easy. I hadn't done any physics in years, and I was making good money. My parents were always saying I was crazy for wanting to abandon a good, respectable job for the prospects of becoming a starving academic."

Sumi and I look to each other and nod. We've both heard that before.

"But when you feel that you've got to make a change, that's what you have to do, right?" said Jirou. "I'm making a lot less money on our stipends than I did working in industry, but I'm happy with it. There's only so much you can take before you realize that what you're doing isn't really _you_."

From his desk behind me, Michel looks up, seeming impressed. "So, Jirou, you basically had to lay out a big roadmap, right? To get from your job to here, you had to go back and take refresher courses, apply to schools, all that stuff?"

"Sure did. It was a pain in the ass."

"Interesting, interesting," says Michel. "I guess to some extent everyone has to do that, but I'm more of a spontaneous kind of guy. I don't know if I'd have had the energy to go through with anything like that."

"What are you talking about?" asked Jirou, scoffing. "You're here from France. That had to take some effort."

Michel shook his head. "It's not like I always had a dream of going to Japan. I didn't. I always thought going around the world would be a fun thing to do, but it wasn't a top priority, either. I just saw that there was this opportunity and applied for it, not thinking that I'd be crushed if it didn't go through. If it happened and I still wanted to by the time they got back to me, great. If not, that was okay, too. Life is this fluid thing, you know? It goes where it wants. I don't get caught up trying to predict which way that river will turn downstream. I just check now and then if I have a fork ahead of me."

"So if your wife had said she didn't want to go to Japan, you would've stayed in France?" asks Sumi.

"For sure, for sure. Didn't turn out that way, though. She's a linguist, so she's relishing the opportunity to study regional dialects of Japanese and so on. Still, that's a professional opportunity, and if she'd wanted to stay closer to family, or to go to a country not quite so foreign to us, that wouldn't have broken my heart. You have to continually weigh what's important to you. It can change from day to day. My philosophy is just to be cool." He holds his palm flat, facing downward, and makes a smooth, level motion toward us. "Like the calm sea," he explains. "Be cool."

Sometimes I wonder if Michel is totally in his faculties when we get to class. It's hard to get him down about anything.

I try to take what Jirou and Michel have to say seriously over the next few hours. Am I at the point where I'm unhappy doing physics? No, I don't think so. I know there's a lot more to the field than the relatively narrow subset I've been working in. I was happy doing data analysis for Professor Mayuzumi in undergrad. If the data didn't fit the curve, I had to learn about other kinds of distributions, tweaking parameters, trying new hypotheses—that's something I can get behind. I happened upon Professor Tanaka and his work, and it wasn't bad, but I kept going with the flow even when I started not liking where I was headed. As Michel would say, that's the time you need to start looking for another branch in the stream ahead.

After lunch, I start going around the building again, looking at posters, trying to see who might need a student, what they do, and the way they do it. Professor Tanaka has a colleague who does theoretical quantum mechanics, and that doesn't sound too bad. I would stay in the same group, more or less, and just shift into another aspect of the work. Still, I feel like I made my decision too quickly last time, so I look at some other possibilities. One thing that catches my eye is a study on the nonlinearities of crabs walking on sand. You wouldn't expect that to be a physics project, now would you?

"You seem fascinated with the crabs, young man," says a hoarse, white-haired professor. "Do you think they're out of place here?"

I shudder. "It crossed my mind," I say, studying one of the posters on the wall more closely.

The professor is older and wrinkled around the eyes. He's pretty thin, too, and pale, but his eyes are a striking blue and quite sharp. It's Professor Chiba, our instructor in applied mathematics for physics. You'd think I'd be more comfortable around someone I know, but Professor Chiba seems to think that anyone who doesn't get his lectures right away is an idiot.

"True," he says, "there are many aspects of crab locomotion that would seem logical to connect to physics, but this study here is about the _sand_. Of all the damn things to be looking at, we're studying sand? It seems quite preposterous at first, but Shirou has taken quite a liking to the work."

I blink. "Pardon?"

"Oh, forgive me. I'm talking about Professor Nakamura. He is a colleague of mine, but very much more on the experimental side of things. Not that I don't do experiments; I do, on occasion, but I let my students handle the finer details of that. Shirou looks at the interactions of the sand grains with one another. His work is very intimately tied to the material's properties. On the other end of the spectrum, I try to have my experiments be as broadly applicable as possible. Fluids, you see. I study fluids, and there are so many fluids out in this world, you can't afford to pigeonhole yourself into studying just one. Don't you agree, Mr. Nakai?"

"I really don't know, sir."

"Well, you should! But you don't seem to know very much right now, do you?"

"Are you referring to my grades? I thought I was doing fairly well."

"Fairly well? I suppose that's an adequate assessment. Given your grades in Kyoto, I should've thought you'd do better than 'fairly well.' I make a point to know a little something about all the students in the department. You're from Kyoto, right? Did some work in solid state?"

"I've been working with Professor Tanaka, yes."

"But you're not sure it's what you want to be doing, is it. I saw you going in circles around the building. It's the march of the prospective student as he looks in vain for opportunities. I've seen it many times before. Why don't you come into my office, then?"

I follow Professor Chiba around the corner into his office. It looks more like a children's toy shop than a professor's workspace. A Newton's cradle sits on his desk, along with a hollow rectangular tube full of colored fluid, tiling back and forth on a motorized fulcrum. The office is full of similar such devices, all with vividly colored fluids in pastel pink, neon yellow, and more.

"Tanaka's a good man, a fine experimentalist," says Chiba. "If you're looking around, it must be that experiment isn't right for you."

"Perhaps it isn't," I confess. "I'm not sure what it is I want to do, though."

"Well, what we study here, in our group with Shirou and others, is nonlinear dynamics—systems that defy simple solutions. Shirou's sand crabs are a great example, as the properties of the sand don't scale up in proportion to the number of crabs walking over it. I study fluids, which is an age-old problem. If you could solve the Navier-Stokes equations in closed form, Nakai, you would get a hefty prize! Turbulence and vortices and so on—they fascinate me. I first became interested in them as a child, gazing through my father's telescope." He holds up his thumb and index finger only slightly apart. "It was a dinky little thing, with an aperture about this wide. But he swore by the optics; he'd ground them himself. So when I saw the stars in the image wavering, there was only one conclusion to draw: the flow of the atmosphere in the summertime heat was distorting the image. That's when I became interested in fluids, but the field is so much bigger than that.

"If you look at electrodynamics or quantum mechanics, you see so many problems that are linear. Superposition allows you to plop down a solution to one problem based on known solutions to others. Nonlinear problems, on the other hand, require true ingenuity. General relativity is one such field, but unless you want to be studying black holes for the rest of your life, that won't get you far in the real world. Fluids, on the other hand, are everywhere. We do more than just that here, of course. There are many nonlinear systems in nature. Take a pen and hold press down on the end with the tip against my desk. If you press down hard enough, the pen tilts. It can't stay upright. Even if you could start it perfectly vertical, it would tilt. Spontaneous symmetry breaking—that's what that is. It's a fundamental feature of some chaotic systems.

"Or have you ever looked at fireflies? They glow according to brilliantly complicated math, Nakai. Too fast and they slow down. Too slow and they speed up. They all constantly check one another for the right speed, but you can subtly make them wink in and out faster than they want to. You can drive the system ever-so-slightly. You can keep the flies in a constant state of anxiety because the frequency isn't quite right.

"Some of my students build and maintain liquid test chambers for examining fluid flows, but they can't know what to look for without the guidance of theory. We do simulations of the flows to identify unusual features that may develop—oscillations between apparent stability and instability, for example. And outside of that, there's always more data to analyze. Ultimately, I want to be able to categorize a flow by the features it exhibits. I want to say, 'This is a smooth, laminar flow with eddies,' and it'd be nice if a computer did that for me instead of five of us going through all videos at the end of each term to find out what actually happened. Perhaps some of those opportunities interest you; perhaps they don't. But now, I bet you know much more about nonlinear dynamics and fluids than you ever thought you would."

There's no denying that. "I have to admit," I say, "doing theory is probably better for my heart than being around machinery that could blow up if something is done wrong."

"You're talking like an old man, like me," says Professor Chiba, who holds back a grin. "I don't think you have to worry about your heart giving out because some fan exploded."

Has the word about that already gotten around? Do the professors talk about how their students screw up over coffee and laugh? "Most people don't," I explain, "but I have a heart condition—an arrhythmia—so I have to be careful."

"Really?" he says, leaning over the desk to peer at me. "A malfunction of the electrical impulses—your heart has settled into an unstable node on the great phase space of its configurations."

"My heart is not a physics experiment," I snap, a bit more defensively than I would've liked.

"No, of course, of course," he says. "Your heart certainly is not. Forgive my intrusion; it is the scientist in me to be curious, even about things I shouldn't be. I hope my indiscretion hasn't deterred you, however. The world of physics is wide and largely unexplored. There's plenty a bright young man like you can do. Maybe not in fluids—no, I think not. But I hope I've convinced you there's quite a bit out there to look at, possibilities for you to consider."

I am definitely feeling that, and it gives me hope. There are definite opportunities for me, even if I don't know what I want to pursue yet. I don't have to stay somewhere I'm having trouble putting all my energy into. Talking with Professor Chiba has definitely given me a glimpse of the possibilities. I'm not sure I want to be working on fluids or with sand crabs, but there are chances out there, and that's enough to put me at ease.

I start to glimpse branches in the river coming up, but I'm in no hurry to choose a path and forsake the others. I can take my time choosing from them, so that I don't regret where my choice takes me.

#

The next two days are a bit easier and more relaxed. Only the passage of time helps me realize how much all these issues were weighing on me. Even homework seems positively relaxing compared to what I've been dealing with. I can't keep four different things in my head and work on them all in parallel. It's much easier to work on one thing at a time.

Ryou was readily accepted back into SDF. He'll be based out of Nerima, which is about an hour away by subway, and he should be able to visit on weekends when he doesn't have duties. All in all, it's as close as he could be while rejoining the Force. Sumi is delighted just to be able to see him so often.

For my part, I'm still looking at research opportunities. I'm not sure what I want to do yet. Professor Chiba took me aside on Thursday and apologized for forgetting something, saying I'd better be in class on Tuesday or else. What's that supposed to mean.

"I think I've found a project you'd be interested in," he explained. "Just remind me before class on Tuesday to bring the paper. I forget it in all the mess about complex residues, but you really need to see it on paper to believe it."

It's kind of nice to have a professor working for you to find out what you'd like to do, I guess.

That just leaves Rin, really. I went to visit her on Thursday, but she wouldn't open the door to her studio. "It's not ready," she said. How will I know when it _is_ ready?

It's not just the damn painting, though. I was hopeful that she'd start something new, but already I'm starting to feel shut out from her again. What did she feel with that kiss? Was it longing for human contact? Regret over what we could've been for each other in the past? Was it love for me, the need to give me comfort, even if that meant with her body?

Or are those the kinds of things I felt for her instead, and I'm just trying to understand her using myself as a base? Either way, talking about all those possibilities in words feels like an inadequate description of that moment. You can't really capture it well.

Rin in general seems to defy words, the same words she has so much trouble using. Some things don't need words, though—like the touch of her lips to mine. Is that something anyone can understand?

"Mitchan, get a camera," says Sumi. "Hisao's got that dreamy look on his face again."

We're working by the dinner table in my apartment. Sumi and I slave over textbooks and printed-out homework assignments that are already covered in incomplete equations and arithmetic. Sumi's been spending more time over here. Ryou's not officially back in SDF yet, but he's been moving things to the base and getting checkups and stuff. He's already away a lot, and Sumi doesn't like to be alone. I'm not sure what she'll do with that apartment, but until she decides, that means I can't afford to look goofy around her, or she'll never stop needling me over it.

"I always look dreamy," I respond.

"Not with that tuft of hair sticking up from your head," she teases.

"It's easy to get your hair looking passable when you let it dry during class and adjust it every five minutes."

Her jaw drops in mock anger, and she pulls her notes away from me. "I guess you don't need these formulas that I copied down while you were too busy doodling yesterday."

Mitsuru leans out of his doorway, seeing what the commotion is. "You guys going back and forth is worse than Game Six of the World Series last year."

"And what happened then?" asks Sumi.

"Cardinals came back and tied it in the ninth with two runs. Then the Rangers scored two in the tenth, only for the Cardinals to tie it again and then win in the eleventh. Rangers were one out away from winning it all, and they ended up losing Game Seven instead."

"Which means Hisao arguing with me is pointless," Sumi concludes. "Thanks for that baseball insight, Mitchan."

"I don't see how that makes me the loser here," I protest.

"Because I say so," she says, 'and that's that."

A pair of thuds on the apartment door cuts off any rebuttal I could make, and Sumi knows it, too. She gets up to answer, grinning with triumph, while I try to sneak another peek at her notes. I don't see the door open, but Sumi seems surprised with the visitor.

"Oh! Hello there. You must be Hisao's friend. Tezuka, right?"

Rin? She's here?

I rise from the table abruptly, and I see her. She's still in her painting overalls, like she'd just stepped away from her paintbrush and walked over. She seems just as surprised as I am. Why should she be? This is my apartment; she shouldn't be shocked I'm around, but her eyes are wide, and she's staring.

Not at me, though. She's staring at Sumi.

"I'm Aoki," she introduces herself to Rin. "Or Sumi, if you like. I'm a friend of Hisao's from Kyoto. It's good to finally meet you. I've been bugging Hisao about having you stop by, but he can be so stubborn sometimes. You've probably seen that too, right?"

On one level, I'm relieved Sumi isn't fazed at all by Rin's lack of arms. She's known all along, of course, and it seems like she's prepared herself for it, trying to keep her focus on Rin's eyes, but Rin's stare is unwavering. It's not hard for Rin to be at a loss for words, but I think Sumi was hoping for at least a slight laugh, or even that Rin might come to my defense.

Instead, Rin starts to look back and forth between me and Sumi. Her mouth moves, but she can't form a single word.

"What's happened?" I ask, coming up beside Sumi and trying to catch Rin's eye. "What's wrong?"

Rin shuts her eyes tightly, taking deep breaths. When she opens them again, her gaze is downward, more toward her feet than either of us. "This is your friend?" she asks.

"That's right," I say. "Sumi is a close friend."

Rin's eyes flash at that, again betraying her confusion, and seeing her confused makes me confused. I don't even understand what's wrong!

Sumi winces, cursing under her breath. "Hisao, I need to go across the hall and check on dinner." She turns back, facing down the hall. "Mitsuru!"

"What?"

"Help me with dinner. I need some help."

"Since when?"

"Since _now_. Hisao has a guest, so _I need help_. Do you get me?"

Mitsuru peers out his door, and a sly smile comes over him. "Right, sure," he says, and he locks up his bedroom without further protest.

"I'm sorry for running out so quickly," says Sumi, bowing to both Rin and me. "Tezuka, I hope you'll stay for dinner. Since my husband's been away, our dinners haven't been quite the same. He and I live just across the hall, though, so if you stop by and Hisao isn't around, just knock on my door, and I'd be happy to help track him down. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Something in Rin's eyes changes, and she nods cautiously. "Would you use bloodhounds or aerial surveillance?"

"What's that?"

"To track down Hisao."

"Oh, I'd probably just call him," Sumi explains.

"That makes sense. Cell phones don't all work well with feet. Mine does because it has big buttons. Otherwise my toes would hit several buttons at once. I used a cell phone like that before. I ended up calling somewhere in Romania. Very intruiging."

Sumi laughs. "You're everything Hisao said you were. Sorry again for ducking out; I hope we'll get to talk more soon." With that, she leads Mitsuru out the door and closes it behind her, leaving only Rin and me inside the apartment.

"So," I say, "what brings you here?"

"Is she your friend?"

Yes, I said that. And that can't be why you're here; you hadn't even met Sumi yet. "Yeah, of course," I answer.

"The kind you do things with or the kind you don't do things with? Because I've tried to understand what the difference is. It all seems really arbitrary to me. People will do things with strangers, but then not with friends, but then if they do things with friends they're more than friends, but strangers are less than friends, aren't they? Are strangers more than friends but also less than friends?"

That makes a surprising amount of sense, and I begin to think Rin has happened upon one of the paradoxes of the human condition…until I realize that this all has to do with me and Sumi.

"That's not—we don't do that. Sumi and I aren't like that. She's married."

"That doesn't stop people."

"Well, it stops me. Why would you think Sumi and I were like that?"

She frowns. "Not sure. Seems really weird, right? If I saw you with any girl, it wouldn't be reasonable to assume you were sleeping with her."

But Sumi answered my door. That isn't any random happenstance. Even if Rin doesn't understand it, she's capable of that kind of fear, of possessiveness, of jealousy. She's a person, after all.

"It's the painting," says Rin.

Huh? What painting?

"I wasn't able to finish the painting," she explains.

So she came here to talk about that new painting she was starting? "What happened?" I ask.

"Actually, I wasn't able to start anything, either. I tried talking to Teacher, but she doesn't understand. People liked it better when I held myself back. I only let a little bit of what was in my head on the canvas at a time, and it worked okay. I could paint about ideas I'd read or thought about, and sometimes, people understood. I painted something for Teacher after her husband died, and it made her cry, but it was a good crying. It made her remember something good. She felt it more deeply than I did, and that was okay with me."

"That's a good thing to do," I tell her. "It's a way you can reach out and touch people."

She nods, but she doesn't look entirely happy. "With arms that aren't mine."

With thoughts and ideas that don't really probe at her soul.

"I tried really hard, but people wouldn't always understand. Even something I thought was really simple could be missed. You asked me about the fruit bowl with the orange. What if I told you it was unrealistic for all the fruit in the bowl to stay the same while the orange rotted away? What would that make you think?"

"I guess that'd be true," I concede. "It did give that sense of impossibility. Is that what it means?"

She shakes her head. "Not to me, but someone told me that once, and I thought I could see that, even though it wasn't what it meant to me."

I'm tempted to ask what it _did_ mean to her, but there can be no greater mistake than asking Rin to explain something.

"When you told me how you had a bad time after I left, it changed something inside me," she goes on. "My mind is very soupy. It's not a clear soup, but it made me want someone to see through it like it was clear soup. Like chicken soup instead of tomato soup. I don't want to be tomato soup."

"It would fit your hair, though," I say, trying to lighten the mood.

She cocks her head. "Maybe that's the problem. Maybe if I dyed my hair, I would be more like chicken soup. I should be blonde?"

"I don't think it works like that."

"Probably not." She slumps a little at that and meets my gaze, her eyes wistful and sad. "When you told me you could never understand me, even as hard as you tried, I thought I should just aim for something else. Making art the way I was doing it wasn't working, but the new thing I tried didn't make me happy, either. And then you came back. Why did you come back? And you started saying different things, more hopeful things. If you'd said those things back then, I don't think I would've left. Why didn't you say them back then?"

There's no good answer to that. I want to say I was drained and frustrated. I allowed myself to believe in the coldest version of the truth because it made me feel like the weariness inside me wasn't my fault. It was the way the world was. The world is neither brutal nor kind, though. It simply is. People can be brutal or kind. Nature can be dangerous or awe-inspiring, but it doesn't act with a conscious will.

In the end, I'm responsible for what I felt back then and how I reacted to it. That's what I need to tell her.

"I wish I had," I say. "I've wished that for a long time."

Shd nods again. "You've really changed. You're better now, more hopeful. You could transform yourself. You're a scientist now, but I tried to change, and I don't think it worked. I like being able to touch people in a small way, but who can reach back through my paintings and touch me?"

A lump forms in my throat; I can't get a word out to tell her, to comfort her, but she meets my gaze and gives a sad smile.

"You want to," she says. "I know you want to, and being near you makes me feel like it can happen. I just don't know if that feeling is real. I don't know what to do, and Teacher doesn't know, either. It's all the same to her. She said I should do what I feel like doing, but I don't know what I want to do. The artist way isn't enough by itself. My way isn't enough either. I don't know if the ways I think I touch people with my painting are really the ways I touch them or if I misunderstand. I don't know if I could ever put myself on a canvas, as hard as I try. I don't know if it's good that you came back and I started trying again, but if not for that I wouldn't have realized I was sad, and not knowing what you feel is bad, so I don't know. There are so many things I don't know. Is that how scientists feel? Do they feel small and dwarfed by the mysteries of the universe? I'd really like it if that were the case. Then I wouldn't be alone, even if only thanks to hypothetical people, not real people. Maybe I shouldn't feel comforted by that, then, and I should look for—"

I grab her by the shoulders as gently as I can; her rambling is a little more coherent than it used to be, but I'm not sure she'll ever stop.

"Sorry," she says, somehow slumping even more. "I thought I could change, but I haven't, have I? It's like I'm walking into the ocean and I can't see where I should go on the horizon, or get there against the oncoming tide."

I crouch down, trying to catch her eye. "Then I'm with you; I'll bring you a boat, so you can get around. I'll bring you a spyglass, so you can see."

Contrary to my intentions, she looks enormously sad at that. "You've changed in all the right ways, Hisao. You have friends and hope. You've also not changed in all the right ways. You're still a really kind person. How did you manage it?"

"I told you before, anything I changed about myself, I changed because of you. Anything I kept the same I kept because I thought of what you would like."

That last part is probably an exaggeration, but dammit, if there's a time and place to stretch the truth, keeping Rin from tears has to be one of them!

"Then that's the person I want to be," Rin concludes. "There are lots of people I could be, and I'm not sure about what I would have to change or keep the same to become them, but right now…" She peers up, finally meeting my eyes, and it's a look of resolve and determintaion. "Right now, I want to be a person you can be with."

Maybe it's just the magic of the moment, but hearing her say that—with such certainty, such force—is a relief to me. After all her uncertain and dire thoughts, I'm overwhelmed. Rin's moods could always change so quickly, and even if I doubt the wisdom of putting her hopes into me, that she has hope at all is inspiring, and I'm driven to respond in kind.

"Rin," I say, "you're already that person, regardless of your doubts or what you believe." And to reinforce the point, I kiss her on the forehead. It feels a bit corny, but I'm hoping it's enough to convince her of my affections without making any demands for something more.

Rin relaxes. She takes a deep breath, and it seems to energize her. She stands up straight and tall, coming to life again. She's vibrant and wonderful; she looks like she could take on anything, and the subdued smile on her face is a sight to behold.

"Can you show me your bathroom?" she asks.

I blink about five times, trying to take that sentence in. "You want to what?"

"I haven't changed so much I don't use a toilet," she clarifies. "That would require a change in biology, and I don't think I'm capable of that yet."

Baffled, I voicelessly point the way down the hall, and Rin quickly ducks inside, shutting the door with her foot. As the light comes on, I'm forced to let out a little sigh. This is one of those challenging times with Rin, where what she does no longer makes a lick of sense to me, but I resolved to deal with them, didn't I? Her mind just moves so fast sometimes—it's nothing intentional. That's what I've told myself. It's just how she is.

Some of the misunderstandings in dealing with her is looking for too much meaning in Rin's actions. She is a creature of whim and impulse, and somtimes those whims and impulses aren't elegantly strung together. It's just a test of patience—and confidence, too, that while the moments when we connect may come and go, they are real and not erased by the times we misunderstand each other.

Like Rin, I don't know if that's real or just wishful thinking, but for now, even wishful thinking is enough for me.

"Your bathroom is very clean," Rin observes, her voice halfway drowned out by the overhead fan. "That's all because of you, isn't it."

"What does that mean?" I ask gruffly.

"You liked to clean things. Would you go to a warzone and put knocked over bottles of soap back on a kitchen counter?"

"No! …maybe."

"You don't have any hooks."

This time I have more of my wits about me. It only takes me a couple seconds to respond. "Hooks?"

"The towels here go on bars instead of hooks. I can't use them."

"Use them for what?"

"Undressing."

Oh. That would be a practical problem, wouldn't it.

The bathroom door opens, and Rin wanders back out, staring me down with her impassive gaze. "Aren't you going to?" she asks.

"Help you undress?"

She nods.

Well, that's easy enough. Her overalls are fastened by two buttons in a perfectly innocent position on her chest. I undo them without trouble, and the garment falls around her ankles. The act does expose her a bit, showing off her smooth, pale legs and a pair of blue and white striped panties. These are striped vertically, though, which nags at me for some reason. I'm not sure why.

And if I don't want to stare, I'd better not think about it too hard.

"Is that all?" she asks.

"You don't need me to take off your shirt to use the bathroom," I counter.

She nods at that. "You're right. That's clever."

We stand there.

"Weren't you going to go?" I ask, starting to fidget with my hands.

"Go where?"

"Into the bathroom?"

"No, I don't think so."

All right, now I'm definitely too confused to make sense of this. Rin can be confusing, but it's not like her to directly contradict herself. For that matter, I can see quite clearly—there may only be steel bars for the towels to dry on, but there are hooks for washcloths and other things inside the bathroom, so Rin shouldn't have had any trouble….

Oh.

She wants me to…_oh_.

Rin narrows her eyes, looking irritated with my reaction. "I would like to have sex with you, Hisao. The erection you had the other day when we kissed made me think you'd be comfortable with that."

The sheer bluntness of her request forces me to laugh, if only in confusion. "Rin, it's not as easy as that. That's a physical reaction. That doesn't mean I'm ready to do anything like that."

"So you don't want to have sex with me?" she asks, cocking her head to the side in curiosity.

"Well, that's not what I said either."

She nods to herself, looking distant. "This is why I don't understand people sometimes. People say no without really saying no, or yes without really saying yes. Very perplexing."

I sigh. Anything else I say to try to explain things would come off exactly like that. There's a simple answer to this question, one I need to arrive at without letting words get in the way.

So I reach out to her, touching my knuckles to her cheek. This is me asking her—why do you want this? It's a question I can't bear to ask with words. The last thing I want to do is ask a question that way and push her to an incomplete answer. But if I watch her, maybe that will be enough.

Her eyes meet mine, and she lets herself settle against my hand. I'm supporting her this way. I'm supporting part of her weight, but it's more than that. It's her heart and soul I'm supporting, and it's this connection between us—confused and garbled as it sometimes is—that I can reaffirm.

"I admit," I begin to say, "I'm not fond of being intimate with strangers. If I'm going to share that with someone, I'd rather it be with someone I care for. A friend, I guess."

"I thought you said friends don't do this sort of thing," says Rin, hardly suppressing a smile.

Yeah, well, I'm not in the mood for semantics right now. I can't keep my eyes off the curves of her legs. Though it makes me feel sketchy for even thinking about it, I open the door to my bedroom and lead Rin inside. I don't think we want any extracurriculars happening in the hallway.

So here we are—I'm fully clothed, and Rin's walking around with her overalls dragging at her ankles. Ah, no, she steps out of them, exposing her feet. The nails are clean, without even a hint of paint. She really must not have been able to paint anything over the last few days. Otherwise, I'd see at least a trace of pigment, but I don't.

I get to work undressing her, as requested. I unbutton her shirt, and I'm treated to the sight of a silky, sky blue bra. Rin closes her eyes as I unhook the bra, and when the straps go slack, I ease the material off her, hanging the bra on the bedpost. I check her expression for even a hint of reaction, but her face betrays little. What I sense from her is subtler than that. When I run my hands down her sides, she relaxes, letting out a breath. It's hard to think of Rin as a tense person, but she puts so much effort into her paintings. Even she needs to wind down sometimes, and it touches me to know she will trust herself in my hands. She's exposed here. Her stubby arms are plain to see. No knotted sleeves hide them now, and I touch them gently. I think before I would've regarded such a thing as disrespectful, but these arms of hers are hers alone. They're part of her, and so I love them for what they are—different and unique, but never incomplete.

Rin, too, feels no anxiety as I stroke her there. Each caress stimulates an easy breath—even a smile.

"You seem really calm right now," I say quietly.

She opens her eyes, and they're full of innocent enthusiasm and joy. "It's like walking in a rainstorm," she says. "When you touch me, I feel like we're connected. It's a really comforting feeling."

Because we _are_ connected, Rin. Ever since I blurted out that I was interested in art to Nomiya, we were bound together, you and I.

Rin's childlike joy is a pleasure to see, but I'm not satisfied with just that. Her skin is colder than mine, but there's an underlying warmth that I find myself drawn to. I hold her back to my chest and begin to kiss her delicately on the back of her neck. Her breathing quickens, and she watches me from the corner of her eye. I see it now, in her eyes—that passion she showed me once before. It hides so deeply there, well beyond the cloudy, impassive expression that usually rests in her eyes, but it's there. It must've been terrifying for her—to realize that her body wanted something she couldn't explain, couldn't understand. She has so much trouble understanding people, understanding herself. I wonder—did she even understand it that night, when I walked in on her in the atelier as she was cold, naked, and delirious?

No matter. She understands it all now. She understands enough to crane her neck around and touch her lips to mine, but I'm not finished yet. I let my hand wander down, to the elastic band that holds her striped panties in place. Touching her thighs in this way starts a fire inside me, and for some harebrained reason, I think to stoke it instead of giving it relief. I guide my hand between her legs and touch her. She spasms, breaking our kiss, but the sensation excites her. She arches her back and starts to grind against my hand, only to start shaking her head in dismay.

"No, Hisao. I want to, but—" She meets my eyes, determined and serious. "I want to see you more."

I can't begrudge her that, can I? I mean, here she is, entirely naked, and I still haven't even taken off my belt.

"Stand by the bed," she says.

I do so, thinking it better to listen to the naked women in my bedroom rather than guess her intentions. Rin eases herself into my desk chair, still breathing heavily, and I can't help but wonder if she'll get some fluids on the leather, but that thought is very, very brief, for Rin's bare foot is caressing my leg, working its way to my crotch.

I see what the desk chair is for now. She needs distance and leverage. This is slightly complicated, for as she pushes against me, the chair begins to tilt, catching on the carpet, but she keeps her balance. I think she must be very good at this—at tilting in chairs, I mean.

As I undressed her, Rin undresses me, undoing the buttons of my shirt with her toes. They're small and frustrate her at times, but when I offer to do it myself, she practically glares at me, and I'm powerless to resist.

That's fine, I guess. With Rin slumped in the chair to work with her feet, I'm getting a nice view anyhow.

With great effort, Rin strips me down. She even takes the belt off my pants by hooking the buckle with her big toe. This is turnabout for how gently I undressed her, for she runs her foot up and down my chest, feeling me—even feeling the scar where the doctors went inside to keep my heart going. It makes me anxious to have so much attention paid to it, but Rin seems genuinely curious, so I don't have the heart to tell her to stop. Perhaps this is a way for us to be connected, too—by past experiences, by events that have shaped us.

By comparison, my penis draws a different kind of interest from her. Rather than play with it the way I played with her, she nudges it back and forth between her feet, like she's playing a game of tennis with herself, and I'm the ball.

"Hey, uh, can we do this?" I ask. "I don't think you have any idea how strange that sensation is right now."

"You're impatient now," she observes, leaving the chair to stand before me. She gives me a full view of herself, as if it natural and ordinary for her. She could just as easily be ordering a cup of coffee—she's so casual about being here. I, on the other hand, can hardly keep from turning away to hide the throbbing that's going on below my waist.

"I'm not impatient," I say.

"You aren't?"

Now that's a trap if I've ever heard of one, and the coy smile on Rin's face is proof of that. It is powerfully alluring to see. Her sultry, teasing gaze is magnetic. She seems so much more alert now than usual. She is here, with me, in this moment, and I want her. I want every bit of her.

She lies down on the bed, and without a hint of shame, she spreads her legs in invitation.

And I'm far too polite to decline a lady's invitation.

This deed we do is steady and deliberate. There is no hurry, and I want to hold myself back as long as I can. No one can know what tomorrow will bring. Is it selfish to want these moments between us to last forever? Rin is on the verge of changing herself again, of deciding what kind of person and artist she'll be. I admit, I'm a little afraid of that choice, but I'm not afraid of her or the person she might choose to be. I've seen her enter that crucible before. She is still Rin through and through.

She doesn't moan my name in ecstasy. She doesn't need to. I see it in her eyes. They bore into me, and in them I see my own reflection. They're like a hall of mirrors, each showing me myself again, and the intensity builds and builds with each reflection.

At last, her gaze breaks away. Her eyes shut reflexively, and she lets a little sound out. Her skin is warm and sweaty against mine, but she isn't finished, not yet. As I pant to catch my breath, she runs her foot up and down my spine, pensive and uncertain.

"You always made me want to change," she says at last, "whether I thought it was good to do or not."

"I could say the same thing," I tell her. "It's natural, isn't it? For a friend, or for someone you love, it's natural to want to be a better person—to be smarter, stronger, or whatever else. But if they truly consider you a friend, you have to remember something: they already love you for who you are."

As I love you for who you are now, and for the possibilities of whatever else you might choose to become.

Rin kisses my cheek at that, a chaste gesture that makes me laugh and makes her giggle, and we lie there, embracing one another, for the rest of the night.


	5. Devotion

**Devotion**

_Epilogue_

When I open my eyes, the sun comes through the blinds in narrow bands, creating a pattern of light and shadow on the sheets. It has to be morning. It's too bright to still be afternoon or evening.

The night was peaceful, I think. Rin is a calm sleeper. I sometimes think she dreams while awake, so sleeping isn't very different for her. What tends to be more interesting is waking her up. Like anyone else, she can curl up and ask for five more minutes of rest. It's a little childish, but it's sweet.

I turn my head and reach over to nudge her awake, but she isn't there.

She's not in the room at all.

Damn. I should've realized it sooner; the bed's too small not to have felt her beside me at some point. When did she leave?

More than that, why did she leave? The thought makes my heart sink; this is feeling very familiar. The only time we've been intimate before, I woke up to find her painting again, and she was jittery and on-edge. She recoiled just at my touch. I thought for sure she must've felt violated somehow, but she never said what exactly troubled her.

Is Rin only able to react naturally when she's not herself? When she's sleep-deprived and hungry or high on codeine? At all other times, does she just find something in herself that keeps her from reacting, that makes her second-guess what she should do? Maybe her brain goes too fast for her body, and by the time her body can catch up, she's already thinking about clouds in the sky or unicorns grazing at a Savannah watering hole.

I may never know the answer to that, truly. I just know that Rin isn't here.

Clang! Something metal hits the tile floor outside, and that shouldn't happen. Mitsuru considers most kitchen utensils and such to be poisonous. He won't touch them. Sumi would've sworn mightily for being so clumsy. The noticeable lack of reaction can only mean…

I go to the bedroom door, only to stop and realize that my clothes are still on the floor. I take a minute to remedy the situation, pulling on a fresh white shirt to put some barrier between me and the cool morning air, along with fresh underwear and socks. Only then do I wander out.

And I see Rin.

A steel pan lies on the floor, and Rin seems perfectly oblivious to it, for she's sitting on the counter. She holds an egg between the big and middle toes on her right foot and cracks it on the edge of a bowl, letting the yolk fall in.

She's making breakfast for me.

It's the most natural thing to do for someone you love, but for Rin, it's demands far more effort, creativity, and affection, and I love her for it.

"You sleep in really late," she says, not looking up from her work. "That's okay, though. I'm not finished yet."

"Late?" I echo. "What time is it?"

"Seven-thirty."

"That's not late."

"It is when you go to bed at seven. But I guess you were tired. I was too."

She's got a point. I could say I'm an overworked graudate student who needs that kind of sleep, but really, I'm not too concerned about defending my sleep habits. I'm much more interested in what Rin's doing.

An array of ingredients is strewn over the counter. Some of them, like the soy sauce, I know are stored in high cabinets above the stove, and I'm at a loss to imagine how Rin got at them, but if nothing else, Rin exceeds expectations, just because she can. How many times did she jump off the counter to retrieve something only to hop back up again? How badly did she twist and contort herself to slice the onions or open the carton of eggs? She didn't have to do this, but she wanted to—for me or for herself, maybe both. Whatever the case, it touches my heart and makes its irregular beat a bit steadier.

"Now you can help," she says, moving right along. "Can you—?" She stops, finally looking at me, and a strange expression comes over her. It changes her face slowly, but a small smile perks up the corners of her lips. "Never mind that," she says. "I think I should say something different."

"Like what?"

She tilts her head, and strands of her disheveled hair dangle over the edge of the counter. "Not sure. Something about this moment, about this time and place, about right now."

"How about, 'Good morning'?"

"Good morning." She frowns, puckering her lips like she ate something sour. "Hm, not quite. Close, though. Good morning, Hisao."

"Morning. What made you start cooking?"

"People eat in the morning. At least, that's what I'm led to believe. And I've always wanted to really learn to cook. I'm getting better at it, but most things don't work well with feet."

"They should have a counter and stovetop that's low to the ground," I say. "A traditional dinner table is low to the ground, too, and you sit by it using cushions, not chairs. Why not make the kitchen the same way?"

"I thought the same thing. Are you a mind-reader physicist now, Hisao? Does the power only activate after you have sex?"

I laugh. "Maybe I'm reading your mind, but it certainly hasn't happened before."

"Really? I thought you said you had girlfriends."

"That's not what I mean!"

"It's okay," she assures me. "If you didn't, they were missing out. There's no problem in your pants after all. Quite fulfilling."

That is strangely reassuring.

"Hisao," she says, her tone small and pensive, "would you help me make breakfast?"

"Are you sure? If you'd rather do it yourself, I won't interfere or distract you." Maybe she thought I was hanging around because I didn't think she could do it. I don't want to give that impression.

"I'm behind enough as it is. Your stomach was growling all night. Why do they say stomachs growl? They don't sound like tigers or lions. Maybe they should say stomachs warble, like cicadas."

I chuckle. "Okay, let's get to it, then." She's right; I'm famished from last night. We skipped dinner with our own, er, activities, and Rin's only been preparing a small portion. I usually make breakfast for Sumi and Mitsuru, too.

Sumi and Mitsuru?

They went across the hall for dinner, and as far as I can tell, Mitsuru never came back. His door down the hall is open, and all this commotion surely would've woken him up by now. Sumi must've kept him from coming back.

This breakfast is going to be _awkward_.

While Rin beats the eggs, I leave a message on Sumi's phone letting her know we're awake and working on breakfast. I expect this is the most discreet way to let her know I haven't forgotten about her and Mitsuru. Her reply, however, is characteristically teasing.

"You'd better have Tezuka stay for breakfast," Sumi writes back. "It's not polite to kick a girl out after you've taken advantage of her."

Something about that rubs me the wrong way, so I send back, "Who said I'm the one who was taking advantage?"

"So you're saying she took advantage of you instead? Do tell. I'll listen to every detail and judge impartially."

On second thought, getting into this argument was a bad, bad idea, and I resolve to write Sumi again only when breakfast is ready. Luckily, neither the eggs nor the corn soup take too long, and Sumi and Mitsuru wander over without making too much of a fuss.

"So, Hisao," Mitsuru begins as we sit to eat, "you hit the home run, right?"

Sumi elbows him in the side. "Really?" she says. "Aren't you out of high school now? Or do we need to send you back?"

"I was talking about baseball!" he insists. "I was talking about how Hisao needed to emulate Oh. Oh hit only .161 in his first season, but he revamped his swing and started clobbering home runs. I was asking Hisao if he did the same."

"And what would Hisao need to revamp himself for?" asks Sumi.

"Uh…stuff?"

Rin blinks, clearly baffled. "I thought they only had home runs in baseball. Is there another sport they have them in?"

"Yeah," says Mitsuru. "The horizontal tango."

Sumi fumes at that, and she pinches Mitsuru's ear. "Hisao's business is Hisao's, got it? If he wants to share baseball stories with you, that's his choice."

"I was talking about Oh!"

"Oh no you weren't!"

This sibling bickering goes on for most of breakfast, with Mitsuru trying to rephrase his questions to be innocent and Sumi having none of it. Rin, on the other hand, struggles over how dancing the tango can be a sport and wonders if figure skating really should be considered one, too.

Eventually, Mitsuru gets the hint that what happened between Rin and me is off limits, and he satisfies himself with reciting Central League MVPs back to the 1960s. Sumi turns her attentions to Rin.

"So, do you cook often?" asks Sumi.

"Not really. Sometimes I just don't feel hungry, especially if I'm painting, but it's something I want to learn how to do. It feels a little like another form of art in some ways, so that interests me."

"I hadn't thought of it that way; I guess I've been too focused on getting things done because when Ryou would get home, he'd just be starving and devour whatever was ready, pretty or not. Still, I guess I've learned a thing or two. Maybe we can work together on a dish sometime?"

Rin nods cautiously, and Sumi goes on.

"That's great! And just so it doesn't sound like I'm inviting you over just to slave in the kitchen, we can have some fun after dinner one of these nights. I was thinking of starting a tabletop game—it's something Ryou and I used to do in Okinawa—but all the stuff going on lately really made me wait a bit. Maybe we can get something started now that that's settled and you and Hisao are together."

"Together?" Rin looks to me. "Are we together, Hisao?"

"Most likely," I answer.

Sumi glares at that, appalled, so I add,

"As sure as I can be of anything. Definitely. Yes."

"We're together." Rin sounds unconvinced, and it's like she holds the words on her lips to decide if she likes them. "That sounds fluffy," she concludes. "Like cotton candy."

"The game?" asks Sumi. "Or that you're together?"

"Undecided. One of those. Maybe both of those. Probably both of those."

Sumi looks to me slyly. "I see where you get your way with words."

I can't deny that. Rin's thought process rubs off on you after a while. You get used to dealing with ambiguous answers and tangled lines of thinking. I say _tangled_ instead of _muddled_ because individually, I think all of Rin's thoughts make sense. It's just that they intersect and weave together in such complicated ways—they don't separate easily.

Still, I consider this breakfast a success. Sumi's taken a strong liking to Rin, and that's important to me. Rin is reentering my life on good terms with the people around me. It means the obstacle between us is the one we've already been fighting: the barrier to understanding. We may plow through it, we may chip away at it, we may decide we can be there for each other with that wall still intact, but it shapes our interactions. It gives form to our friendship. We would not have struggled and come out the way we are without it.

#

The weekend passes by too quickly. As touching as it was to be with Rin, we both have things we want or need to do. Rin leaves breakfast confident and inspired, eager to get back to her studio and paint. My weekend is just grueling, with coursework piling up to my eyes. Losing all of Friday night didn't help in that respect, not that I regret it.

And though I want to work with Sumi, she has her own matters to tend to. Come Monday, Ryou is starting his first day back in SDF, and Sumi spends all Sunday night checking and rechecking the apartment for something he might've left behind, something he might need. It falls to me to make sure she gets up early enough Monday morning to see him off.

Naturally, when I knock on the door to wake her, she's already dressed and waiting.

"You weren't planning on coming in your pajamas, were you?" she teases.

No, I absolutely wasn't. "Did you sleep?" I ask her.

She shakes her head meekly. This is a tough thing for her, but she puts on a brave face. It's so early in the morning it's not even bright out, but the three of us—Mitsuru, Sumi, and I—make our way about an hour across town to the SDF camp in Nerima. It's a long hike for a short meeting. When we approach the perimeter, Ryou is there in fatigues, constantly pulling and scratching at his uniform.

"It doesn't fit quite right," he remarks. "It itches. I'll just have to get used to it, though."

"Is that what big, tough guys in SDF do?" asks Sumi. "They train with thirty-kilo packs, in the rain, with itchy clothing and smelly boots?"

"Something like that, yeah," says Ryou.

Sumi wraps her arms around him, her head barely coming up to Ryou's chin. "Then I'm glad you're my tough SDF guy," she says, "because if anyone can handle it, it's you."

Ryou looks to me and Mitsuru helplessly. He may be able to disassemble a rifle in under thirty seconds, but showing affection for his wife in public still flusters him. I tap Mitsuru on the shoulder and turn him away.

After all, it'd be a crime to let these two go their separate ways without sharing a kiss.

Their separation isn't permanent, of course, but once the kiss is done and Ryou strides forward for the gate, Sumi faces the challenge ahead of her with determination and strength. It won't be easy. In a way, it's exactly what she feared, but to do what was best for herself and her husband, she was able to walk a path she'd found frightening before. She changed the course of her marriage for the better, despite her worries, and I have the utmost respect for her as a result.

I, on the other hand, still have a choice in front of me, one I haven't settled on. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be working in solid state anymore, at least not with the hands-on, experimental stuff. I want to see more of the big picture, to be able to take the problems we want to solve in my hands and work to make them understood. There's no shortage of options; there's just the matter of choosing one for myself.

#

When I come to class Tuesday afternoon, I find the door to that path open, waiting for me to walk through it. It takes the form of a journal article, printed out and lying on my desk.

"Chaos Theory, Heart Rate Variability, and Arrhythmic Mortality," reads the title.

It's like a glimpse of my life and death all rolled into a single paper.

"Is this real?" I blurt out.

"Very real," says Professor Chiba, grinning. "What do you think, Mr. Nakai? You seem to have a personal stake in this sort of research. Chaos is one of the most fascinating subjects within nonlinear dynamics. Any of my colleagues in the nonlinear group would be more than qualified to supervise such research. And biophysics is all the rage these days. There's money coming out of politicians' eyes for this."

It seems almost too good to be true. It's enough to catch my interest, at least. Just brushing up on the differential equations background is enough to make me realize how much math I would need to get into this field, but that doesn't intimidate me. It's not unintelligible; there's just all this talk of stability analysis and linearized systems that tells me I should review a good bit, or maybe take an additional class next term just to find out about it.

#

"You should do it. It sounds like you."

When I see Rin that evening and explain the paper to her, that's her opinion. No hesitation, no time to think about it. There's just absolute certainty, and it's enough to convince me.

"All right," I say. "I'll talk to Professor Chiba tomorrow about joining his group. Even though he intimidates me a little, he's gone this far to help me find something I'd like, so he can't be that bad."

"Good." She doesn't look up from her canvas, even though she could look me in the eye if she wanted to. The back of the canvas faces me; she wants this work to be a surprise.

The door to the studio inches open, and a gray-haired woman strolls in with a tray of teacups. "Are we enjoying ourselves here?" asks Professor Adachi. "I was just getting ready to leave, and I thought the two of you might enjoy some refreshment. It also gives me an excuse to peek at Rin's new piece."

"She won't let you look," I warn her as I take a steaming teacup. "It's bad luck, you know."

"Teacher's immune to bad luck," says Rin, making no protest as Adachi circles around to examine the painting. "I once saw her break three mirrors in ten seconds, but she came back from the pachinko parlor the next day with twice as much money as when she left. Very mysterious."

"I have been known to gamble now and then," Adachi admits, peering at the painting with her reading glasses. "And I usually come out better than the house does." She stifles a giggle. "Oh my. How scandalous, Rin! Is this really a good idea?"

"It's not meant to be scandalous."

"No, I suppose not. Is this the kind of thing you want to paint, going forward?"

Rin shrugs. "It might be. Let's see how this one turns out first."

Adachi pats Rin on the shoulder, and Rin doesn't flinch or shy away. Her concentration is unbreakable, but I think I catch a glimpse of a slight smile on her face.

Adachi leaves the cup of tea by the side of Rin's chair, and she tucks the empty tray under her arm. She walks back toward the studio door, where I'm doodling away. I should be working or reading papers, but the sight of Rin working is something I want to record in my memory, so I sketch her instead. Adachi peers at my doodles, not pretending to be subtle about it, and laughs softly to herself.

"Sharp, jagged lines, far too thick to capture anything. Oh, how refreshing it is to see—someone with the persistence to make art with the tools and skills afforded to him. I think too many of us accept only perfect technique and sharpened pencils before we begin. That's not what art's about, though, not in my mind. It's been a pleasure having you here, Nakai. I hope you know that. Both for me and for Rin."

"I don't intend to go anywhere," I say, sipping on my teacup.

"But I am," she says. "Or rather, Rin is going somewhere. It's just a matter of time before she finishes assembling her final portfolio. Sure, if she goes for a master's in fine arts she can stay for a bit longer, but now or later, she will move on. I'm getting old, Nakai, and I likely won't take many more students, if I take any after Rin at all. I have done my best to guide this girl and give her support. I'm glad that you've returned to her life, for it gives me peace of mind, knowing you will be there even after I've stepped back from her life. Do you understand me?"

It's a role I'm happy to fill. "But Professor," I say, "you don't think Rin will just leave you behind and forget you, do you?"

"Perhaps students remember great teachers," she says, "but good teachers leave their mark and are eclipsed by their students in time. I take pride knowing I've left a good mark and helped a brilliant girl wander through the road of life with a helping hand." She bows slightly, smiling. "Good night, Nakai."

"Good night, Professor."

She opens the door to the studio and make to leave, but as she steps into the hall, Rin calls out. "Teacher?"

Adachi brushes a strand of gray hair from her face, looking back. "Yes?"

"Thank you."

"For what?"

Rin cocks her head, puzzled, and finally resolves to shrug, much to Adachi's amusement. The old professor chuckles to herself.

"I understand perfectly," she says. "Good night, Rin."

"Night."

Adachi slips out, and Rin works quietly for the next hour or so. How quickly we've settled back into old patterns, with me working on coursework (or pretending to do so) while Rin paints. I must say I still don't know how my presence helps her. Maybe having someone around reminds her that she wants to paint to reach people? Maybe it gives her a sense of urgency not to keep me waiting? I don't know. And, it probably doesn't matter. Rin likes it, and that's enough for me.

A paintbrush is laid to rest, rousing me from my thoughts. "Done for the day?" I ask.

"Done," she says flatly. "Come look."

I close my notebook and come around. It's a painting of my apartment—the common area and the kitchen. Rin has painted herself on the counter, grasping at the whisk with her toes, and I'm looking on, hardly dressed well enough to be in a painting, with a smile on my face as I watch her.

"I wanted to say something," says Rin, "but every time I put it on my tongue, it tasted really weird, so I painted this instead. It won't mean the same to other people as it means to us, but that's okay. Art means different things to different people anyway, so why not do this?"

I can't help but agree. Capturing that moment means those feelings will stay with us forever. It's a moment we've shared together; it's a testament to the connection between us. Though we may never understand each other perfectly, there are things we can both look back on and remember.

"You didn't used to smile," Rin goes on, "but now you can. Now you do. You've changed, but you're still a lot the same, too. I want to do that. I've decided. I've always painted, and I'll still paint. Some things I'll paint for just you and me. Some things I'll paint for people, even if they don't really capture who I am. And sometimes I'll try to see if all of me can be understood—or at least more of me. I'll keep trying all these things, and people will learn about me one stroke at a time. The arms I hug people with aren't mine yet, but I can make them more and more my own."

Such hope is what I've tried to bring out in her; it's moving to hear that it's taken root. I kiss her on the cheek, but she fusses.

"Messy," she says. "When you do that, you slobber."

She's never been one to hold back her displeasure. Well, I aim to please. I wipe at her cheek with my thumb, but Rin rises before I can finish.

"We should eat," she says.

I agree with that. I'm famished, too, and Sumi will be starting dinner soon. Rin turns out the lights and locks up the studio, and we go together, confident and sure, for we both know the way.

**The End**

* * *

Here ends "Direction," which I hope demonstrates well how old wounds can heal, how people set in their ways and lines of thinking can come together to forge new paths for themselves, realizing they must be true to their hearts.

I hope you've enjoyed the story. I don't currently have any plans for another _KS_ piece, though I do have some ill-formed ideas, but I'll be writing, in any case. Hopefully we can meet again someday.

Until next time,  
Muphrid  
2013 February 11

_For notes and commentary on this story, visit westofarcturus dot blogspot dot com_


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